the truth about vaccines - no, the real truth

The MMR vaccine hoax, which is still having repercussions in the UK and other countries, is now just the tip of the iceberg. The most disreputable papers, of whom the Daily Mail is clearly the vanguard, recently went to DefCon one when a teenage girl died on the same day she had the cervical cancer vaccine. Leaping to a conclusion faster than an Olympic athlete villager with a pitchfork, they immediately started blaming the vaccine, the government, 'Big Pharma' and demanding the programme be immediately stopped.

Of course, they've been against it all the time, so at least they're consistent.

....Well, except that in their Irish edition they were for it, because the Irish government weren't and their readership seems to be people who don't really care what they're complaining about as long as it's irrational.

Now it's one thing to believe that 'Big Pharma' - i.e. the pharmaceutical companies - are corrupt and sociopathic. In fact, this is probably true of just about every big company. I personally would think you'd be quite mad to believe any big money-making operation had the world's best interest at heart. They don't exist to make the world a better place, they exist to make shareholders rich.

But that doesn't make everything they do evil, or the people who work for them. There is an adage for that: 'Throwing the baby out with the bathwater'. I for one rely daily on a couple of the products of Big Pharma to keep me alive.

The worst of the vehemence towards governments and Big Pharma seems to revolve around vaccinations. Partly, I'm sure, because of the very nature of having a needle stuck into you, or your tiny little vulnerable baby. I'm sure there wouldn't be anything like the opposition to vaccination if they were administered in some less invasive way, like the Polio vaccine on a sugar cube that was the preferred method of delivery when I had it some 40 years ago.

There has now built up a kind of very amorphous conspiracy theory about vaccines, the basic thrust of which is that the government (whichever country you are in) has colluded with the big pharmaceutical companies to throw a lot of poisonous chemicals together into a vaccine which we don't really need as the diseases they prevent aren't that bad or aren't a threat. Almost any kind of symptom can and has been attributed to side-effects of these vaccines if you just take anecdotal stories (such as "My son had the vaccine and 2 weeks later had symptom X")

As a result of this, the diseases which had almost died out are now making a comeback: Measles, Mumps, Polio and Pertussis are all occuring at huge rates compared to a few decades ago and children are dying and being mentally and physically disabled because of it. Meanwhile the problems alleged to be caused by the vaccines are remaining at the same levels they always have been.

The 'big' problem with the MMR vaccine was supposedly autism, yet the rates of this don't differ between countries where the triple vaccine was used and where the single vaccines where used, nor within countries before and after the triple vaccine was introduced. The evidence just isn't there for these theories, yet still they persist, multiply and continue to convince people.

It's hardly shocking that so many people can end up believing in what is actually utter nonsense. Here in the UK we have a programme on TV called 'QI' and every week, the show highlights how much perceived knowledge in the public domain is just plain wrong. Lemmings don't commit suicide en-masse, Tomatoes were 'known' for a long time to be deadly poisonous, Richard Gere had nothing to do with Gerbils ....ad nauseum.

Partly, I think the problem is that we prefer simple answers and scientists can't always explain things in a few sentences. Some things just are very complicated. The idea that a girl gets a vaccine and a few hours later, dies is a coincidence seems wrong to us - "surely there must be a connection?", we think.

In fact, all across Britain people died that day after doing something completely unrelated: eating Kitkats, kissing someone, reading the Daily Mail - yet we don't jump to the conclusion that one caused the other. It's because of this conspiracy theory, that uninformed members of the public and irresponsible media continue to spread, that we single out vaccinations as the smoking gun of medical problems.

In fact the press are the real villians of the piece. Though some 'alternative' therapy peddlars stand to gain by spreading this conspiracy theory, and several celebrities are building their career on it, the gutter press always seem to take the lazy approach and, perhaps through a lack of scientific understanding, not check the facts.

So it's fantastic to see an article about vaccination which is rational, sticks to the facts and bucks the trend:

Wired recently published this article about how bad the anti-vax movement is getting in the US and it's a scary (if edifying) read.