FORT90 forum

http://www.wnyc.org/news/articles/143118

spread from an orthodox kid who went to the uk, where anti-vaccination routines have been a much larger deal than the states. however, park slope is a big hotbed of the more common anti-vaccination type in nyc - high income, liberal arts educated folk who fear autism or are otherwise engaged in a "it's not natural" mindset. it's unfortunate, and something i'm obviously more concerned about, but we thankfully haven't had a serious outbreak in that community yet.

one of my working thoughts on this is that if you have highly verbal, liberal arts focused folk, the spectre of autism is particularly frightening because if you're focused on verbal communications as a signpost of intelligence or "smartness", any diminishing of that capacity is something to be uniquely feared.

bryan caplan talks about the "cost" of fallacious beliefs in his books and essays. it's a metaphor i've stolen, because it works very well:

for example, creationism is a low-cost belief. if you're a creationist, even a young earther, chances are you will still avail yourself of antibiotics. there's no real intersection between your beliefs and your important subsistence choices.

similarly, ten or twenty years ago, being anti-vaccinationist was also low-cost, because you were likely the only one on your block who believed so. you and your children benefited from herd immunity. however, as the belief in anti-vaccination routines rises, and especially as it's clustered in communities like park slope, etc, the cost of this belief will rise as outbreaks become more likely and their effects more devastating.

if these outbreaks got worse, or there was a special event related to it - a prominent person's child died from a preventable childhood disease, or a prominent anti-vaccinationist had a similar tragic event - the cost of the belief will rise. the belief has already inflicted some cost on people in new york state, for example:

http://www.health.state.ny.us/regulations/public_health_law/section/2112/information_for_physicians/pregnant_women.htm

http://www.health.state.ny.us/regulations/public_health_law/section/2112/information_for_physicians/children_less_than_three.htm

it is actually illegal to give it to pregnant women as well, which makes it harder (at this initial stage) for me to get a dose for liz, for example. their beliefs have inflicted a cost on us, despite this mechanism being completely invisible to those holding the belief.

another part of this is that there won't be a lot of media pressure immediately against this view. the people who made jesus camp, for example, aren't going to make "anti-vaccination camp" or some kind of agit-prop showing how scary and irrational the anti-vaccination folk are.

1) there wouldn't be much of a market for it.

and

2) it's likely that many filmmakers, etc, are going to be sympathetic to this view.

http://www.slate.com/id/2217798/


if you think of it as "creationism for the npr set", it makes sense.

this isn't even getting into the chelation therapy to cure autism stuff. that's another stew for someone else to cook.

i know what you're basically saying when you say "npr set," but interestingly enough, NPR has spent a good amount of the past few days discussing/debunking myths behind vaccines, and basically just trying to tell people "your kids won't be autistic, ok?"

but you're right; it does appear that this is an idea being adopted by people who would ordinarily view themselves as "rational" and "intellectual."

as for the pregnant thing, i seem to recall that on the radio, they mentioned that the vaccine was actually safe for women who were pregnant.  i assumed that meant it was legal?

Worth a read

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/10/ff_waronscience/

The Vaccine issue, which fuses together a lot of past century hysteria re-warmed over and a lot of Lefty Intellectual types with distrust of science, reminds me a lot of when the Christian Right and the Radical Feminists got together to try and censor pornography.

I'd love to see "anti-vaccination camp." There are very few things as powerful as seeing the people behind ideas talk about them.

I just finished reading that when you posted it -- good article, although I think saying that this "isn't religious" early on kind of muddies things. Yes, it isn't associated with an existing religion; it definitely involves magical thinking and the allurement of the tribal group that's pretty similar to how religions operate, it just happens to be a religion of the liberal arts variety.

As me and my wife are about to have a kid, we had to have this conversation, which thankfully was very short as we're both of the same mind, which is that we don't want our kid to die horribly from something that can be easily preventable. I was interested to note that when we went in to Berkeley Pediatrics to interview the guy who would wind up being our pediatrician, that they were gently pushing that you really have to vaccinate your kid. I was kind of worried, given that Berkeley can be Park Slope West, that they would be wishy-washy about it. Instead, they were very firm in a non-judgmental way.

Not to change the subject, but still somewhat related: so what's everyone's take on the Swine Flu vaccine?

i wish it was more widely available. i'll be (hopefully) getting a dose as a high-risk designee (caretaker of pregnant women and children under six months of age) due to shortages.

our pediatrician was notably relieved when my wife asked about vaccines (in the context of "you're not a fucking nutbag, right?)

joe: good point. i'm using "npr set" as a descriptive term of the set, not npr. npr is not loony (just oftentimes boring).

Same as my feelings on most Flu vaccines: best given to people under 18 years of age and over 50 unless they are at a high-risk of exposure, dealing with certain care-giving issues or have chronic immune conditions.

Hence why I'm skipping mine. Sorry if that makes me some kind of left wing loony. Though depending one what happens to be me, career-wise, in the next few months, might take the shot. Meaning if I find myself taking care of the young or elderly or something like that.

Also, isn't it widely available at the moment? You can get it at pretty much every drug store in my neighborhood.

The seasonal flu vaccine is widely available right now; the H1N1 vaccine is what's in short supply.

h1n1 and seasonal flu are two different vaccines. so far there's an h1n1 shortage, while the seasonal flu is easier to come by, which is probably what's generally available. at this point the state has abandoned it's nov 30th deadline for healthcare workers to get a mandatory flu vaccine shot due to overall shortages. (as well as some possible lawsuits from one of the two the nurses unions)


i skipped this before by accident, but the nys law deals with vaccines with thimerisol in them. it was only adopted last summer, and runs contrary to cdc guidelines and common sense. (because the demos is retarded and listens to jenny mccarthy.)

The flu shots around here have been heavily advertised as being effective against the swine flu. So are they just stupid or flat out lying? Knowing my neighborhood, I'd say yes to both counts.

each shot is engineered against the specific strains involved. so unless they're giving out h1n1 shots, they're lying.

I vaguely remember somebody saying on the radio that the U.S. gubbmint has actually bought all of the H1N1 shots, so if it's somebody offering them for sale, it's just a regular seasonal flu vaccine, which wouldn't help you with the swine flu at all.

(Although, and they're probably using this to justify their pitch, since we're talking different strains, it would be possible to get them both at once, which would truly suck. So getting a seasonal flu shot would "help" in a sense.)

as an aside, i've heard it put forth by a few food researchers now that the strain of anti-science thought in the otherwise educated, generally liberal community is a symptom of poor liberal arts education. and that it's related to the anti-vaccination crusades in that you have people who think they're smart, but don't realize they lack expertise in these particular fields. (or particularly understand how things work)

which does make sense, i think, as you can have someone who's afraid of gmo techniques but still able to bash those ignorant creationists. but that's also a function of the cost of belief i mentioned above. whether you believe or disbelieve in evolution, you don't change the way you live your life. you just apply it to whatever cultural warfare fights you tend to get het up about.

with food stuff and vaccines, however, there's a sub-market that's ready to cater to your needs, whether it be organic or slow foods vendors and cooperatives or some fuckface selling you chelation therapy materials. (seriously, i cannot believe anyone would do that to their child.)

Hence all the troofers out there who believe they are demolition experts because of some YouTube video out there.

they do seem to conflate "research" with "reading things", which is not what research means.

i think another barrier in general is that "i'm educated" serves as a similar brake that "i'm righteous" serves for religious folk. you don't have to wonder "am i making a mistake here" because you already know the answer and are not duped by the medical industry/homosexual agenda.

for example: time and again in that wired article comments section you see the whole "why is our health an industry?" as if that's supposed to be an indictment in and of itself. the naturalistic fallacy is an awful, awful thing.

http://pitchfork.com/news/36949-billy-corgan-versus-the-h1n1-vaccine/

So after some talking and research, I think that I'm wrong and that drug stores do actually have the H1N1 vaccine, it's just a question of whether they actually have it in stock at every store and who they can give it to -- apparently they're only supposed to sell it to people who are supposed to get it first and I've seen wildly varying reports on the availability of it, as well as questions as to what form it's in (nasal spray vs. shot), as apparently that makes a difference in whether you can take it or not (a pregnant friend claimed that preggos can only take the shot, not the nasal spray).

the nasal spray is not recommended for pregnant women.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/01/28/antivaxxer-movement-leader-found-to-have-acted-unethically/

wow, someone should set that guy on fire.

Uh oh, hope all those Park Slope parents don't catch wind of this! Their heads might explode.

If they take in their kids for vaccination and maybe learn something about hysteria I'd see it as drawing a win from someone who very clearly has the deaths of quite a few on his hands.

From what I hear about the dude's supporters in England, I'm sure a lot of them will claim this as some kind of corporation-based media slander to hide the trooooooooooooth.

I was pretty happy to find out that our pediatrician refuses to take patients if you're not going to do vaccines.

From the comments section.

I'm so glad I read Eric Hoffer's True Believer. It manages to frame these kind of inherently absurd arguments with at least some level of understandability.

i don't mind people with absurd arguments until they start producing offspring

sadly, i really do think that it will take a celebrity child's death from a common disease to put the brakes on this trend. or a really large outbreak with a high bodycount in some place like park slope or another enclave of general wealth and education.

then again, high profile deaths haven't done much for the hiv denialism train, though that was always far less popular. (and ultimately, far less dangerous to random strangers)

The Anti-Vaccination folks were basically in the same situation as the HIV denialists until the Autism link was faked. Once a general hysteria was set off with that it just cascaded into government fear, pharma fear, etc. There's a good chance it will start to swing back the other way leaving it back to the wackjobs, but that will take a while.

oh holy hell:

http://www.upi.com/Health_News/2010/02/09/Mumps-break-out-in-New-York-New-Jersey/UPI-44931265724286/

http://www.
hollywoodlife.com/2010/02/26/jenny-mccarthy-says-her-son-evan-never-had-autism/


Oh.

Yeah those immunizations need to be better researched so that I can save a little bit of face here.

I wonder how many TV appearances she'll do about her changed position. I'm sure it will be less than the years where she used her child's original diagnosis as an excuse to continue to seek the spotlight after her acting career tanked.

the important thing is that her son is getting better and she's made hundreds of thousands* helping endanger children all across the world.

* reportedly, mostly from book sales

http://www.jennymccarthybodycount.com

(i'm not particularly convinced of the use of agitprop like the above, at least in this particular case)

http://www.ted.com/talks/michael_specter_the_danger_of_science_denial.html

i understand his barely-contained rage.

I love the term "Big Placebo." He's a bit too hand-waving about potential benefits of some of the plants from that end of town, but given the "Coffee Enemas and Cayenne Peppers Cure Cancer" crowd I completely understand the attitude to everything that's touched that bath water.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/vaccines/view/

it'd be a non-starter, but i could see a lawsuit against mccarthy from someone whose kid dies of measles, and trying to tie that to her advocacy.

It would likely lack legal grounds but the public attention angle of such a case would be priceless.

it'd basically be a slapp suit in nature and certainly fail on free speech grounds.

however, the "but he's not actually autistic" angle would be fascinating. that poor kid.