Autism Street

If there’s one thing typical of anti-vaccination trolls on the internet, it’s that they are fairly predictable. Amidst tons of logical fallacies, they’ll persistently ignore evidence, cite things that don’t say what they think they say, provide supporting information in the form of links to conspiracy theory stories, repeat things that have already been pointed out as incorrect, and pretty consistently ask for proof of a negative wherever they can. In addition to all that usual fare, it’s fairly common, that they’ll jump right into something about “evil toxins” when advocating against vaccination. A perfect example of this is persistent use of what I’ll call “The EPA Mercury Limit” canard.

In a recent article by Trine Tsouderos at the Chicago Tribune, the anti-vaccination brigade infested the comments like fleas. There was relatively little actual commentary on the article itself, the intersting points it raised, or the subject of the article - Boyd Haley’s new “dietary ingredient“ - OSR, that’s apparently being given to autistic children by parents who believe their childrens’ autism diagnoses are the result of some condition that is mecury-induced. Instead, anti-vaccine commenters turn the dialogue to vaccines, pharmaceutical industry conspiracy, and seem to spend more time attempting to appeal to fear than anything else.

One of the pervasive appeals to fear from vaccine rejectors is of course mercury in flu shots. They have to bring up flu shots most of the time, because they know (or should know) that mercury (ethylmercury specifically, present in the preservative Thimerosal, in multi-dose vials of injectable flu vaccines) has essentially been removed from the routine childhood vaccines that used to contain it. It’s been greatly reduced, or has been pretty much gone for seven or eight years now. The “Flu shots” is pretty much all they’ve got.

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Liz over at I Speak Of Dreams is keeping a list of several blog responses.

Visit the following link for more:

tinyurl.com/yz3vpor

Should you be afraid of a Flu shot?

If you’re a hard-working parent with school-aged children (perhaps even children enrolled in a couple of different public schools) who really can’t afford to have sick kids, let alone be sick and miss work yourself, the answer should be pretty straightforward.

A nasty case (or cases) of influenza in the household can create a few to several days of real overall misery (and serious illness in severe cases). And, while not perfect by any means, it’s pretty much a no-brainer to most intelligent people that even a modest reduction in the probability that you or a family member contracts influenza, or spreads it to others, is a good thing. Yes, the common-sense measures like regular hand washing and keeping sick kids at home, etc. are good ideas, and probably help decrease those probabilities quite a bit, but the scientific consensus is that getting vaccinated against influenza is a great way to decrease those probabilities.

Vaccine (and seemingly mainstream medicine) rejectors often parrot the claim that flu vaccines “don’t work”. While efficacy is seasonally variable, and influenza vaccines are by no means perfect, published science on the subject provides a different picture. Anti-vaccination advocates putting forth a claim that flu vaccines “don’t work” in support of not vaccinating, are doing little more that propogating logical fallacy (the Nirvana fallacy). Getting a Flu shot for yourself (or for your children, if you have them) is not an expression of false belief in instant invincibility or unchecked faith in the pharmaceutical industry, rather it is a rational and very simple step to take in order to decrease the odds of getting sick yourself and/or transmitting the flu to others. Just because a flu vaccine may not be perfect, does not mean all the chances that illness could be reduced/avoided should be tossed out.

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I recently made a new Autism-Hub blogger button that appears in the sidebar here at Autism Street. I wish I could take credit for real CSS skills, but the truth of the matter is that I “borrowed” the animation technique from several other websites.

The good news is that a technique like this is fairly easy to do - there is no javascript or anything like that, all you need is two images (link to zip file containing both provided below) and a little know-how to add the link to the html of your blog and add some styling to the CSS.

 
Here’s how it works:

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Over at AoA, Jake Crosby has written a rather lengthy piece about Kev Leitch for which the point seems fairly elusive. You can read a little more about it, or find a link to the post over at LBRB. Neither piece strikes me as really interesting (yes, including Kev’s note), but I did find this comment over at AoA somewhat amusing:

Yeah, that “whole ND thing” is “so clearly” a “pharma front organization”, isn’t it?

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I’d written long ago about my take on the Queen song, “Under Pressure“. I still love that song, and crank it up when I hear it. To me, it communicates the weight of acceptance in society for many.

I ran across this video  from the guys at Tranquil sometime last year while surfing the web. Sure, it’s a rough take (and admittedly so by them) in spots, but I love the song (and their cover), and I dig the basement collaboration.

If you have a favorite song about acceptance, please mention it in the comments.

Perhaps I should, but this year I’m not making New Year’s resolutions, I’m suggesting some for another blogger.

I just read Kent Heckenlively’s latest, Entering the New Year as Public Enemy #1 over at Generation Rescue’s “Age Of Autism” blog. Most Autism Street readers probably already see the AoA blog as having very little to nothing to do with autism. Many readers are also likely to be familiar with some of Heckenlively’s writing through other blog articles:

Heckenlively’s Data
The price of anti-vaccine fanaticism: Case histories
Deeper into Heckenlively, AoA, and Anti-Vaccination Stances

Heckenlively’s recent post takes issue with a Discover Magazine story, “Vaccine Phobia Becomes a Public-Health Threat.” In the post, Hecklively seems to take ownership of vaccine phobia through what looks like attempted justifications of fear of vaccines. In my opinion, those justifications look like little more than appeal to former authority, misunderstanding of epidemiological research, persitent, yet unconnected-to-autism fear of thimerosal or aluminum, and somewhat ambiguous fear of neuroinflammation in the suggested context of heavy metals, or viral or bacterial infection. Not surprisingly, Heckenlively’s article does not directly connect any of these fears with autism, rather it accepts the title of “Public Enemy #1″ (apparently on behalf of those who fear vaccines) in exchange for hope that points raised by Heckenlively will simply be addressed by someone in the media.

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