On July 6th in 1885, French microbiologist and medical trailblazer Louis Pasteur successfully treated 9-year-old Joseph Meister for rabies, which was previously a death sentence, and made vaccination the magic bullet that began to rid the planet of diseases, and spare billions the legacy of millennia of incurable maladies. (Smallpox, once the scourge of humanity and slayer of hundreds of millions since at least 300 BC, was wiped out completely in 1980, solely and entirely by preventative vaccinations of the type pioneered by Pasteur.)
Until college dropout Playmate of the Year and pretend doctor Jenny McCarthy came along 120 years later, and concluded all that medico-sciencey stuff was just a massive plot to give children autism and make pharmaceutical companies rich, or something, giving a lingerie-thin patina of credibility to legions of low-IQ anti-vaxxer whackjobs who got tired of looking for extra-terrestrials, Bigfoot, and the Loch Ness monster, and now have a new hobby to pursue.
I've simply stopped talking to these idiots: my own IQ drops noticeably after such a "conversation". Sadly, I'm a midlevel provider in a clinic, and HAVE to get some idea about vaccination status for the kids that I see, so there's no escaping this madness.
ReplyDeleteTo paraphrase the twitter thread you linked to earlier today: "We're all dying of measles, rubella, influenza, smallpox! If there were only some breakthrough medical advance, to protect us from these scourges!?!"
Thank you, Aesop, for your spotlight of lucidity!
Something something something...
ReplyDeletehttps://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15287394.2018.1477640?scroll=top&needAccess=true&journalCode=uteh20&
Thanks for illustrating the exemplar fallacy "Correlation does not equal causation".
ReplyDeleteThis is a pseudo-study without even a veneer of seriousness, which merely combed poll results for its information.
It may be posited with equal likelihood and far better anecdotal suspicion that women who were bright and concerned enough to get the HPV vaccination were also not having unprotected sex or reproducing wildly outside of marriage, while those too stupid to take such a reasonable precaution against potential cervical cancer were half-drunk trailer park sluts and welfare moms looking for a baby-check gravy train, which more than explains the disparities of conception rates between the respective groups.
QED
I could publish that exact conclusion, dressed up in clinical language, using precisely the same study data, and get it peer reviewed in about a week, except it's so common-sensical it'd be pointless, and it doesn't advance the narrative of the SJW anti-vax free-range idiots.
Most Scientific Findings Are Wrong Or useless"
https://reason.com/archives/2016/08/26/most-scientific-results-are-wrong-or-use
TL;DR version:
"Stanford biostatistician John Ioannidis estimated that the non-replication rates in biomedical observational and preclinical studies could be as high as 90 percent."
For the laymen, "non-replication" means it's bullshit.
We won't even go into the problems with testing any vaccine WRT pregnant women, as it's both illegal and unethical to do so, for reasons that were obvious to most people, at least before 1973. So any study undertaken would likely be disallowed purely on those grounds.
Thanks for playing, and we have some lovely parting gifts.
An otherwise pretty level headed friend is an anti vaxer. She kept posting bullshit ‘proof’ and I said it was bullshit. She got mad when I mentioned not one piece of her so called proof met the level of academic rigor a high school science paper would need. She got annoyed. I said I would listen if she sent me any peer reviewed scholarly articles. She didn’t, probably because they don’t exist.
ReplyDeleteYour friend, Mr. Modsquad, probably should become one of Andrew Wakefield's patients.
ReplyDeleteOh, yeah. His bullshit study was so olfactory odious, that the Brits yanked his medical license, and, here in The Colonies, he doesn't have one to yank.On
Pro Tip: when some idiot is so rank, that TPTB de-license him, you ought to consider the possibility that he is a charlatan. And, that his malarkey might get someone dead. Of a vaccine preventable disease.
Non-replication does not mean the theory is bullshit. But I think they mean here continued failure to replicate outcomes stated in the theory. We could say that if most scientific findings are wrong, then some failed replications could also be wrong.
ReplyDeleteFluoride against tooth decay.
In New Zealand we have a small ongoing war between elected Councillors in small cities who will not allow fluoridating water supply [ to prevent tooth decay ] because they said Fluorine is poisonous.
When they found out it was the fluoride ion. then the evidence was they said that fluoride caused various ageing senilities.
Round the circle it goes. Old people becoming senile > see we told you so twenty years ago.