The Good, The Bad, and the Frustrating
Let’s start with the good!
It’s pretty tough to keep up with all the media coverage of swine flu, but a few standouts from recently deserve mention here.
First, from the Daily Show. I was so, so happy when this came on that I had to do a few laps around the living room. Hooray for John Stewart and all the writers on the Daily Show.
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Doubt Break ‘09 | ||||
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Way to be, Daily Show.
Then there’s Amy Wallace’s Wired article, which many of you have probably already seen, but it was so great that it should just get even more attention. Wallace outlines the history of the anti-vaccine movement’s “War on Science,” interviews Paul Offit, and even offers a basic lesson in skepticism:
Still, despite peer-reviewed evidence, many parents ignore the math and agonize about whether to vaccinate. Why? For starters, the human brain has a natural tendency to pattern-match — to ignore the old dictum “correlation does not imply causation” and stubbornly persist in associating proximate phenomena. If two things coexist, the brain often tells us, they must be related. Some parents of autistic children noticed that their child’s condition began to appear shortly after a vaccination. The conclusion: “The vaccine must have caused the autism.” Sounds reasonable, even though, as many scientists have noted, it has long been known that autism and other neurological impairments often become evident at or around the age of 18 to 24 months, which just happens to be the same time children receive multiple vaccinations. Correlation, perhaps. But not causation, as studies have shown.
If you are frustrated by the media coverage of the vaccine “debate,” reading this article will give you hope for humanity’s intellectual future.
In the interest of keeping this manageably short, I’ll stop here for now. So please go read the Amy Wallace article if you haven’t yet.
Josh Said,
November 3, 2009 @ 8:53 pm
I actually just got into a “discussion” on Facebook after I posted the Bad Astronomy link regarding the anti-vaxxers.
My opposite threw out a series of claims “proving” the dangers of vaccines, for which I attempted to address every one here: http://quay.wordpress.com/2009/11/03/a-response-to-some-vaccination-concerns/
Or as a PDF: http://www.40two.org/A_response_to_some_vaccination_concerns.pdf
I include footnotes and links to every source I’ve used, which most anti-vaxxers unfortunately fail to do.
It also saddens me that despite all the evidence (and complete lack of evidence to the contrary), people have been misled into thinking there is a genuine controversy, when there truly isn’t.
Keep up the good work!
@jdewald
Julie Said,
November 4, 2009 @ 11:19 am
Wow. I just glanced over that. It looks very impressive. Great work.
Josh Said,
November 6, 2009 @ 5:29 pm
@Julie – Thanks! It’s something I’m a tad passionate about, mainly because I really intelligent people who spread misinformation unintentionally need to be stopped in their tracks with good data.
There are those who will follow the path of Woo no matter what evidence is presented… but if I can convince just one scientifically-minded person who has started to be swayed…
Also, I’d like to be one more voice in the war that you, Skeptoid, SkepticDad, Science-Based Medicine, etc are fighting.