Wired have an article about how parents are being frightened into not vaccinating their children because they think it causes autism. The article talks about the pseudo-science of those making the argument. It fails at this point:
unlike in the debates over creationism and global warming, Democrats have proved just as likely as Republicans to share misinformation and fuel anxiety
The implication is that those who see a problem with the AGW hypothesis are sharing misinformation and anxiety. That’s wrong for all sorts of reasons, and there are some parallels between AGW proponents and the anti-vaccine movement.
For a start, it is AGW proponents who are sharing anxiety. It’s a doom cult. Perform these rituals or the world will end. Misinformation is spread on both sides of the AGW debate. The media dramatises and over-simplifies climate science; scientists openly exaggerate because they think it will motivate people and thereby save the world; and skeptics have been known to make the wrong kinds of arguments.
From the article:
To be clear, there is no credible evidence to indicate that any of this is true. None.
When you’re talking about vaccines, at least you have some empirical evidence about who’s taken what vaccines and who’s got autism. Epidemiology presumably can suffer from statistical tricks, though, especially when studies are small and numbers of people with autism are small. Climate science is even worse off. We’re taking very few measurements compared to the size of the system and the timescales involved. All kinds of statistical skullduggery goes on with trying to turn tree ring widths into temperatures. Data and methods are not shared properly. There is no credible evidence to indicate that doubling CO2 concentration in the atmoshphere causes n degrees of warming. None. We have ice cores that show a correlation but the temperature changes before the CO2 concentration does. We have tree rings that show temperatures changing but not that anything new or scary is happening. We have melting ice in various places but ice seems to have melted and frozen all over the place in the last 10,000 or so years. We have satellite data that shows not much of anything happening. We have land based measurements that tell us putting concrete near thermometers causes them to read higher temperatures. And we have computer models that tell us more about the modellers’ theories than about the climate.
We don’t have a mechanism: everyone agrees CO2 alone isn’t important enough, so there must be some feedback mechanism, but no-one can tell you what it is. Richard Feynman described the state of climate science a long time ago.
But researchers, alas, can’t respond with the same forceful certainty that the doubters are able to deploy — not if they’re going to follow the rules of science. Those tenets allow them to claim only that there is no evidence of a link between autism and vaccines.
A similar problem occurs in climate science. The burden of proof is on those claiming that CO2 will cause warming. But AGW theories seem unfalsifiable. If AGW proponents make predictions that turn out to be correct without understanding the mechanism and making new predictions with the theory that have not been measured before, then it might just be a lucky guess — temperatures go up and down all the time anyway. If they make predictions that turn out to be wrong, there is always an excuse or a refinement that doesn’t change the basic hypothesis: it’s just a Pacific oscillation we forgot to mention. The Wired article mentions the anti-vaccine movement’s “ever changing rhetoric”, for example, “Autism One…has shifted their aim away from any particular vaccine to a broader, fuzzier target: the sheer number of vaccines that are recommended.”
A short film featuring devastating images of sick kids — some of them seemingly palsied, others with tremors, others catatonic — drove the point home. The film, accompanied by Bryan Adams’ plaintive song “(Everything I Do) I Do It For You,†ended with this message emblazoned on the screen: “All the children in this video were injured or killed by mandatory vaccinations.â€
Sounds a bit like Al Gore’s film, to me.
Paul Offit is a vaccine advocate who invented a vaccine and made some money out of it.
But in certain circles, RotaTeq is no grand accomplishment. Instead, it is offered as Exhibit A in the case against Offit, proving his irredeemable bias and his corrupted point of view. Using this reasoning, of course, Watson and Crick would be unreliable on genetics because the Nobel Prize winners had a vested interest in genetic research. But despite the illogic, the argument has had some success.
This is analagous to AGW skeptics being accused of being in league with the oil industry. Here it is “illogic”. Of course, AGW proponents get government funding and plenty of people seem to be making money out of alternative medecine at the Autism One conference. It can explain people’s motivations but doesn’t alter the arguments.
“The choice not to get a vaccine is not a choice to take no risk,†he says. “It’s just a choice to take a different risk, and we need to be better about saying, ‘Here’s what that different risk looks like.’ Dying of Hib meningitis is a horrible, ugly way to die.â€
What to do about climate change is about choosing risks. Do you risk destroying the economy and making everyone poor to combat a possibly imaginary problem, or do you let everyone get rich and able to deal better with environmental problems that actually happen?
According to science journalist Michael Specter, author of the new book Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet and Threatens Our Lives, the controversy surrounding vaccine safety has made lack of expertise a requirement when choosing members of prominent advisory panels on the issue. “It’s shocking,†Specter says. “We live in a country where it’s actually a detriment to be an expert about something.†When expertise is diminished to such an extent, irrationality and fear can run amok.
Oh dear, that sounds like it might be a book that has made the same category error about AGW skepticism as the Wired article. But the problem he’s talking about seems to me more like a problem of government advisory panels wielding power over them. I don’t much care if it’s an expert or a layman threatening me with force backed laws.
On that note, there’s one bit I’m uncomfortable about.
But when it comes to mandating vaccinations, Offit says, Fisher is right about him: He is an adamant supporter.
“We have seat belt rules,†he says. “Seat belts save lives. There was never a question about that. The data was absolutely clear. But people didn’t use them until they were required to use them.†Furthermore, the decision not to buckle up endangers only you. “Unless you fly through the window and hit somebody else,†he adds. “I believe in mandates. I do.â€
Anti-vaccine people don’t want the government to force their children to take vaccines. I can understand that. I don’t want to be forced to make sacrifices to Gaia, either. Wired has this to say:
Looking at 3,292 cases of measles in the Netherlands, the study found that the risk of contracting the disease was lower if you were completely unvaccinated and living in a highly vaccinated community than if you were completely vaccinated and living in a relatively unvaccinated community. Why? Because vaccines don’t always take. What does that mean? You can’t minimize your individual risk unless your herd, your friends and neighbors, also buy in.
I’m not convinced this justifies forcing people to take vaccines.