QuoteIf ignoring the concerns of scientists about the abuse of Quantum Mechanics wasn't bad enough, to conclude that the teachings about vaccines as represented by the curriculum are not "unbalanced" from a "scholarly" perspective simply renders one speechless.

QuoteI had sided with the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

QuoteThis is erudition in the age of cyberspace: You surf until you reach the conclusion you're after. You click your way to validation, confusing the presence of a website with the plausibility of an argument.

QuoteThe USA has suffered its first measles death in 12 years, according to Washington state health officials.

QuoteThose unknown vulnerables represent a lot of people: cancer patients undergoing treatment, transplant recipients taking anti-rejection drugs, people living with HIV, anyone with an inborn immune deficiency, anyone getting high doses of steroids—and the 4 million children in the United States who at any point are less than 12 months old, the recommended age for the first dose of measles vaccine.

Quotethe boy has a genetic autism syndrome that has nothing to do with vaccines, his mom told BuzzFeed News.

QuoteOn Tuesday night, actor and comedian Jim Carrey began tweeting a string of messages expressing his dismay at California's new law that eliminates vaccine exemptions for personal or religious reasons.

QuoteYslas-Roach says she "feels horrible" that his daughter was exposed to the measles, adding, "it completely broke my heart. We didn't do this intentionally." If Christian had been tested Jan. 11, Yslas-Roach says, the results would have been back in time to prevent the exposure to Maggie and others. "Our family has gone through hell, dealing with the commentary on social media and from the regular media over the fact that people think we were running around exposing people."

QuoteI'm offended. Are you? "Cartoon Compares School Allergy Accommodations to Anti-Vax" shar.es/1oS3lx #foodallergy

QuoteThe 18-month-old boy died on February 18 -- the first known fatality among more than 570 recorded measles cases since October in the German capital -- a Berlin health department official told AFP.

QuoteThe study of the psychology of risk perception has established that our judgments and decisions about any possible danger are the product of both the facts and an emotional assessment of how those facts feel.

QuoteBut before the vitriol toward vaccine refusers and hesitants grows too shrill, those of us who criticize vaccine refusal and hesitancy as a selfish emotion-driven denial of the evidence and a threat to public health, need to consider how we level that criticism. Dismissing such fears as irrational and vilifying vaccine refusal and hesitancy as ignorant and anti-social may be factually accurate, and understandable as the fear of a resurgent disease spreads, but it is emotionally arrogant and combative, and could make the problem, and public health, worse rather than better.

Quotewhat we're really asking politicians about is whether they think it's a good idea to force a parent to do something to their child that might run counter to their beliefs

QuoteYou have the right to refuse the vaccine. You don't have the right to put other kids at risk during an outbreak.

Quote"I know what it's like to be scared and just want to protect your children, and make the wrong decisions," Russo says.

Quote"Fear, or the perception of risk, is subjective," Ropeik says. "It's a matter of how we feel about the facts we have, not just what the facts say.

Quoteempathetic toward mothers who fear vaccination while persuasively arguing for the morality of vaccines

Quotethe question of what is the relationship between the individual and the collective

QuoteI think the other way into empathy is to look at how scared people are, and to think about why they're scared, and what's happening culturally to support and encourage that fear.

QuoteThe study's surprising results: When doctors assumed parents would be OK with vaccines, they were. More than 70 percent had their child vaccinated.

On the other hand, when physicians were more flexible and allowed for discussion, most of the parents — 83 percent — decided against vaccination.

QuoteFor the best science on vaccines, you can't beat @theIOM goo.gl/lFIVug

QuotePaul Offit likes to tell a story about how his wife, pediatrician Bonnie Offit, was about to give a child a vaccination when the kid was struck by a seizure. Had she given the injection a minute sooner, Paul Offit says, it would surely have appeared as though the vaccine had caused the seizure and probably no study in the world would have convinced the parent otherwise.

QuotePsychologists have a name for the cognitive bias that makes us prone to assigning a causal relationship to two events simply because they happened one after the other: the "illusion of causality."

QuoteOoops, CNN did it again. Yesterday. In a story by Elizabeth Cohen and Debra Goldschmidt entitled Arizona measles exposure worries parents of at-risk kids CNN couldn't resist giving the vile Dr. Wolfson more national exposure.

Quote from: CMdeux on February 02, 2015, 12:37:27 AM
TO anyone reading:  this is what is SO dangerous about looking for information about vaccination on the web-- people like this ABOUND, and most of them have exactly no self-awareness when it comes to the limitations in their ability to accurately read and understand professional literature in proper context.    They fail to understand that just because something is in writing, just because that writing exists within an archive-- does not make it currently the best available explanation.  Sorry, but you really do have to have all that advanced education when you play in the deep end of the pool.  That's a bummer for laypersons wanting to challenge paradigms, I realize-- but there are people who have a few decades invested (who are probably smarter than you), and who regularly invest 50 to 80 hours each week on this stuff, and they do NOT get the same thing out of reading those references.  In fact, they shake their heads over this kind of thing. 

It certainly gives ME a headache.  It's whack-a-mole.    And really, this 2008 blog post about the exact same phenomenon is a good demonstration of the kinds of tactics used here.  While it never gets old for those moles, it sure gets old for those of us holding the mallet.   

Please stop this.  A community whose children are at elevated risk from respiratory diseases, some of which are vaccine-preventable-- a community which has one member who has lost a child to such an agent-- this is just rude. 

Quote
Are the anti-vaccine tactics effective?

If we accept that decisions to vaccinate are based on an evaluation of the risks of both commission and omission, then we should ask if exposure to anti-vaccine information has a meaningful impact on perceptions of the safety of vaccines. There is some literature that has studied this question. An interesting paper published earlier this year by Betsch and colleagues set out to prospectively measure the impact of anti-vaccination websites. They recruited 517 internet users (from sites for parents or those interested in medical information) and compared risk judgment and vaccination intentions before and after viewing different websites. (The evaluation was in German and used German websites. ) Users were directed to view a vaccine-critical website, or a neutral website, and then evaluated again.  The authors found that viewing anti-vaccine material for only five to ten minutes increased the perception of risk of vaccination, and decreased the perception of risk of omitting vaccines, compared to viewing neutral websites. It also lowered vaccination intentions.

Overwhelmingly, policy analyses of the anti-vaccine movement have centered on the need to address fears by providing reliable, accurate understandable information. But if H1N1 taught us anything, it's that traditional public health advocacy and messaging is probably insufficient to deal with anti-vaccine tactics used today. We believe that providing the facts alone will be effective, but this tactic is probably ineffective when responding to unfounded fears. Providing factual information, and correcting misinformation needs to be at the core of our advocacy, but it alone does not address the strategies used by anti-vaccine advocates.  It's the reality we need to accept if we're going to effectively counter these messages.

Conclusion

One of the biggest drivers of health behaviors is risk perceptions. Anti-vaccine information effectively shapes this, and science advocates need more effective responses. The opportunity to get a real-time understanding of popular anti-vaccine sentiment could help us improve our responsiveness. But unless we focus on prospectively influencing the key factors that drive decisions about vaccination, we'll continue to struggle.

Quote from: CMdeux on January 31, 2015, 08:06:49 PM]
And while I agree that in a perfect world, a physician should be able to take a fifteen page manifesto (which may include everything from fairly nuanced statistical risk modelling to out-and-out bizarre and clearly impossible things) and calmly, patiently address each item one by one, the simple reality is that there is NO TIME for that in modern medicine.

SO yeah-- I'm fine with that solution, but pragmatically, I have to say, okay, but even ONE of those people in a day puts my physician at a place where s/he can't see three other patients.  At least.  What if I have to wait another two MONTHS for an appointment because there are a bunch of those people?

That, too, has costs for others.  Besides, not all physicians are great educators, when you get right down to it, and many of THEM aren't vaccine experts by any means-- but they do read practice parameters and the like.  So can they answer EVERY off-the-wall thing that a patient reads on the internet?  Most certainly NOT-- and even if they go and look it up, or ask an expert, that's yet more time devoted to it.

  So I'm a bit impatient with this nonsense-- because that is what it is. If they have "concerns" after reading at the CDC, etc. then I'm not sure what to say to that.  I guess that I do sort of think they aren't all that bright.  I'm sorry, and I know that seems mean.  But at that point, I do have to sort of shrug and point out that they ought to listen to people who are, and hopefully not waste SO much time in the process that those people spend their entire lives patiently explaining and explaining things that are really fairly obvious.

NONE of the "vaccines are not safe" rhetoric has any backing to it.  So it is a waste of time, when you get right down to it.




Well, darn!  That Pediatrics paper is behind a paywall now, which is a bummer.  Library access, that'd be my recommendation on that one.

Quote from: CMdeux on January 31, 2015, 08:06:49 PM
Ahhhh-- but (and I say this recalling many people in the generation older than us) those people who drove drunk back when it was socially just a "personal choice" weren't irrational either.  Not really.

They really believed that they were being rational in what they were basing their decisions upon.