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A small but increasing number of children in the United States are not getting some or all of their recommended vaccinations. The percentage of children under 2 years old who haven't received any vaccinations has quadrupled in the last 17 years, according to federal health data released Thursday.
Overall, immunization rates remain high and haven't changed much at the national level. But a pair of reports from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about immunizations for preschoolers and kindergartners highlights a growing concern among health officials and clinicians about children who aren't getting the necessary protection against vaccine-preventable diseases, such as measles, whooping cough and other pediatric infectious diseases.
The vast majority of parents across the country vaccinate their children and follow recommended schedules for this basic preventive practice. But the recent upswing in vaccine skepticism and outright refusal to vaccinate has spawned communities of undervaccinated children who are more susceptible to disease and pose health risks to the broader public.
[...] The data underlying the latest reports do not explain the reason for the increase in unvaccinated children. In some cases, parents hesitate or refuse to immunize, officials and experts said. Insurance coverage and an urban-rural disparity are likely other reasons for the troubling rise.
Among children aged 19 months to 35 months in rural areas, about 2 percent received no vaccinations in 2017. That is double the number of unvaccinated children living in urban areas.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 12 2018, @09:09AM (21 children)
The real solution to finally solve the anti-vaccination movement problem is just to inform completely. Now we have two illogical trends in media:
1. Vaccines causes autism, diarrhea, cancer, pipes rust and lack of milk in nearby cows - from anti-vaccination movement.
2. Vaccines are gods' elixir, have no side effects, and when vaccinated citizen opens the tap, chocolate milk pours instead of water - from "mainstream" media.
These opinions are coming from lack of knowledge. The vaccines-related information from scientific papers is very scarce, and does not allow to audit the production, it's like trying to understand modern computer with instruction manual of a slide rule. Information about vaccines development, production and technologies are a very high secret, even if they're critical for human lives. They just can not be checked, verified, audited, so lots of false assumptions are coming from it. When they will be open, I'm sure that some of these anti-vaccination groups will collect money, buy some vaccine from storage, put it into spectrometer and literally count the atoms comparing to the open documentation. This will finally end trend 1, and will do audit to make trend 2 more rational.
But suddenly when you propose it, for some reason this makes all media screech like a weened piglet about "potential losses". Now they have what they ask for - if information is forbidden, the misinformation goes in.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 12 2018, @12:07PM (19 children)
This is wrong. They are ignorant, but that ignorance is not the origin of their opinions.
The information deficit model does not apply to anti-vaccination views. You can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into.
Effective messages in vaccine promotion: a randomized trial. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24590751 [nih.gov]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_deficit_model [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 12 2018, @01:22PM (9 children)
Its hilarious that they are studying how to best spread vaccine propaganda and think that will increase the trust people have in them.
There is a common error among academics here to think people are just idiots because they are too busy to be experts in everything, so they use argument from authority/consensus heuristics most of the time. The thing being missed is, once they do really care about something, the same people may not be able to really assess the facts and theories, but the first thing they figure out is you are trying to manipulate them.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 12 2018, @02:28PM (8 children)
You must not have read the study.
The researchers knew that some people were duped into believing a fabricated study linking the MMR vaccine to autism and the researchers thought that if they corrected that misconception then those people would be more likely to vaccinate. The sad thing was that they were successful in correcting the misconception, but it either didn't affect the intent to vaccinate or it made them less likely to vaccinate.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 12 2018, @03:05PM (7 children)
Here is the purpose of the study:
Ie, they are studying how to manipulate people into doing stuff. Whether that is via sharing (their version of the) truth or not is irrelevant in the end to them.
These people are already beyond using the CDC as an authority for the argument from authority heuristic. If they havent yet been exposed to this info (doubtful) they are going to look it up later or ask someone they do consider to be an authority for how to interpret it.
Like I said, the mental model these academics have of the people they are attempting to manipulate is so wrong it is hilarious.
Also this study is the usual worthless NHST trash wherein they think "not significant difference" means "no difference" and "significant difference" means their favorite explanation is correct:
No, all you can say is the people shown the cdc info responded slightly different on the likert scale survey. Eg, they answered somewhat agree rather than strongly agree because the information made them uncertain and they planned to go look it up later. It may have nothing to do with actual lasting agreement.
This is all wild speculation, they make no effort to distinguish between different explanations for their results:
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 12 2018, @04:21PM (6 children)
Oh no! Those public health epidemiologists are trying to manipulate people by showing them evidence that their unhealthy beliefs are based on "misconceptions".
How dare they assume that they actually know more than the common person does when they have merely studied the subject for years.
Nothing is truly knowable; therefore, objective reality does not exist and my truth could never be false.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 12 2018, @04:41PM (2 children)
Its interesting how the same people who trust and perform NHST (where you test a strawman null hypothesis instead of your hypothesis, then draw conclusions about your hypothesis) also tend to come up with strawman arguments in general. Its like a personality type, or mental state. Maybe I should email someone who studies the minds of NHST users, eg Gerd Gigerenzer [mpib-berlin.mpg.de], about this phenomenon.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 12 2018, @05:13PM (1 child)
It's interesting how some people employ motivated skepticism to deny any evidence that goes against their preconceptions.
It sure seems convenient to always maintain your initial belief because you can find a reason why counter evidence isn't perfect and, therefore, inconsequential.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 12 2018, @05:39PM
Nope, I looked at the study and it was crappy in the same way as thousands (tens of thousands by now?) of other studies I have looked at and dismissed for the exact same reasons. Then on top of that they have this ridiculous conception of how their target audience thinks because they think in terms of populations instead of individual people. Those results are uninterpretable, one would hope they learned from that wasted opportunity and improve their methods but I doubt it from what I read in there.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 12 2018, @06:42PM
the cdc are just lying whores pushing whatever soft kill weapons the completely unaccountable fucks at big Pharma and tax payer funded black ops want to inject into the slave children. the slaves are noticing their kids are now completely disabled so the sum doubles down along with their army of sycophantic brainwashed/brain damaged mob of zombies. keep it up and see what happens.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 12 2018, @07:31PM (1 child)
Indeed. It is rather astounding that the anti-vaxxers would trust the word of a former Playboy playmate touting a now discredited study over the considered opinion of the world's most renowned doctors and epedemiologists. *Shrug*
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday October 13 2018, @03:34AM
Some people are just too stupid to live. Maybe we should let natural selection do its job... behind a suitable quarantine wall, where they won't endanger the rest of us.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 12 2018, @03:10PM (6 children)
I've seen what the MMR has done to some kids. Many people seem to think all anti-vaxxers are ignorant, but I also believe those that think that can be ignorant too. Not all anti-vaxxers blindly believe what they do. First, some don't believe the vaccine is the problem, it's what is added to the vaccines to preserve it. Several people I know only skip the MMR vaccine. All the anti-vaxxers I know would get the MMR vaccine if it was offered in individual M, M and R shots, AND didn't use the current preservative. I don't remember the name of it now. Having said that, sure, there are also some crazy anti-vaxxers out there too.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 12 2018, @04:06PM (5 children)
I doubt that you've observed the MMR vaccine do anything. Just because something happened after something else, doesn't mean that the first thing caused the second. This is called the post hoc fallacy.
The people that believe a MMR vaccine autism link were duped by a fraudulent study.
People who believe that preservatives in vaccines cause autism are ignorant of the data that directly contradicts it.
People who believe that "too many, too soon" and believe that combination vaccines are harmful are ignorant of the mechanisms of immunological memory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_hoc_ergo_propter_hoc [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MMR_vaccine_controversy#1998_The_Lancet_paper [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thiomersal_controversy#Scientific_evaluation [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyclonal_B_cell_response [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 12 2018, @04:34PM (2 children)
Exactly. At the same time the measles vaccine was introduced there was also:
1) A reduction in people purposefully spreading the disease (ie, measles parties)[1]
2) The introduction of (unreliable)[2] blood tests to "confirm" the diagnoses based on symptoms alone[3, 4, 5, 6]
3) The biasing of doctors to not diagnose measles if told the patient is vaccinated.[5]
So how much did each factor contribute to the drop in measles diagnoses?
Refs:
[1] http://jid.oxfordjournals.org/content/189/Supplement_1/S4.full [oxfordjournals.org]
[2] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17308917 [nih.gov]
[3] Walter A. Orenstein, Rafael Harpaz; Completeness of Measles Case Reporting: Review of Estimates for the United States, The Journal of Infectious Diseases, Volume 189, Issue Supplement_1, 1 May 2004, Pages S185–S190, https://doi.org/10.1086/378501 [doi.org]
[4] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17609829 [nih.gov]
[5] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2134550/ [nih.gov]
[6] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17609829 [nih.gov]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 12 2018, @05:52PM (1 child)
Are you trying to argue that the measles vaccine doesn't work?
1. Your link is broken, but I doubt that a reduction in "measles parties" for children would dramatically reduce the infection rate for the entire population especially considering that it is an airborne disease.
Ref. 2: An ELISA doesn't measure the same thing as a NT. An ELISA measures antibody binding to target antigens while an NT measures the neutralizing capacity of antibodies. Not all antibodies neutralize and not all neutralizing antibodies are equal.
Ref. 3,4,6: I don't really get your point. Do you mean that a symptoms-based diagnostic is better than a blood test because the blood test is producing thousands of supposed false negatives or that a symptoms-based diagnostic is unreliable because it's producing false negatives since the doctors aren't used to seeing measles anymore?
Ref. 5: Are you saying that the lack of blinding in a small efficacy study (80% disease in unvaccinated vs 0% in vaccinated) from over 50 years ago proves the vaccine doesn't work?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELISA [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutralizing_antibody [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 12 2018, @06:52PM
Interesting...
The Clinical Significance of Measles: A Review. Robert T. Perry and Neal A. Halsey. The Journal of Infectious Diseases 2004; 189(Suppl 1):S4–16. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15106083 [nih.gov]
pdf here: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/b7e0/c83a2232536a507ef061563000b59d97db66.pdf [semanticscholar.org]
Once someone gets (full blown) measles they are immune for the rest of their lives. Since everyone is a child at some point and 95% of children got measles, it was pretty much only children that got measles.
No, I'm asking what was the relative contribution of each of those factors to the drop in measles diagnoses?
They have multiple blood tests for measles that don't correlate well with each other, so how are they considered reliable?
Before the vaccine, measles was diagnosed based solely on the symptoms. The vaccine was introduced at around the same time as the blood tests, and the clinical definition of measles was eventually changed to require a confirmatory blood test. The info in those citations shows that 90-99.5% of symptomatic measles cases are not confirmed as measles by the blood tests. Thus, it is possible that 90+% of what was called measles before vaccines and blood tests (~1965) was actually something else. Ie, in the worst case scenario the pre-1964 data here could be 10-200x too high: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Measles_US_1944-2007_inset.png [wikipedia.org]
Now the reality is much more messy since the blood tests were not adopted all at once. Some doctors would use it, others wouldnt, and it depended on the situation. Even by 1982, most people were not getting confirmatory tests:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6751071 [nih.gov]
Here we can see the progression of the measles diagnostic criteria. First thing to note is they started the vaccination campaign without even agreeing on the definition of "measles" until 15 years later. Second is the the definition becomes more and more strict over time, eventually only "laboratory confirmed" cases are counted.
1983:
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00001225.htm [cdc.gov]
1990:
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00025629.htm [cdc.gov]
1996:
http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00047449.htm [cdc.gov]
So before 1979 there was no definition of "measles", it was just up to the doctor to decide. 1983 - 1990 no blood test confirmation was required. From 1990 - 1996 either a case confirmed by a blood test or two "linked" unconfirmed cases counted. And from 1996 onward only lab confirmed cases or a case linked to a confirmed case is counted.
The point is the doctors who know a child was vaccinated are less likely to diagnose measles based on the same symptoms. So you can get a drop in diagnoses just by telling doctors that people were vaccinated.
So to reiterate my point. I want to know how much all these other factors contributed to the drop in cases that were observed. Currently 100% of the drop is being attributed to the vaccine, which we know is wrong.
From ~500K cases/year to under 1K cases/year (~100 in 2018), whats the relative contribution?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 12 2018, @06:57PM (1 child)
whatever. maybe it's the pesticides. the rate of autism is exploding in such a fashion that it is highly alarming (don't even try to quote big pharma propagandists or their minions in 'government' for the numbers) and until these drug/chemical dealers are held accountable by The People you can't blame some for making their best guesses as to the culprit. these industries are (likely knowingly) making vegetables out of the whole nations' children. 1-2% of the parents are responsible enough to do something about it and the whores of power want to send the pigs in. good luck with that.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Reziac on Saturday October 13 2018, @03:48AM
No, the rate of *diagnosis of autism* is rising, which isn't the same thing. This may be due to more actual autism (possible if we're seeing self-selection for carrier mates), or previously undiagnosed cases now getting diagnosed, or "now that we have a hammer, everything looks like a nail".
And it's also become highly fashionable among the Silicon Valley set, as a form of victimhood by proxy.
If it's environmental due to heavy metals or whatever, explain why China, presently drowning in its own pollutants, isn't the world hotbed for autism.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 13 2018, @09:52AM (1 child)
What I wrote in previous post is based on my experience and probably related to my environment. I have personally met a few people which were against vaccinations and I could classify them to two categories:
- Religious people who don't want to use vaccines because this is against their gods' intention, holly texts, it prevents salvation, etc. With them, any discussion is just not possible. As with all radically religious people, they are irrational not only in this part.
- People, usually who met with side effects personally or by their closest family, who got then ignored by doctors and want to know more about things I wrote earlier.
I'm not sure about other groups, the Internet now is full of American trolls, useful idiots, extremists (although I found that most of these Internet anti-vaccination groups are mostly made of people from my first category) so it's based on my personal discussions.
About this autism-vaccinations link, I found that the first group seems to indeed believe in this part, but this all autism stuff is based on research now repeated without success and the problem with previous research has been already discovered (although it's a hard pill to swallow in modern political propaganda). Now this debunked autism link seems to be used to distract from openness, which is a fuel for all other anti-vaccination groups.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 13 2018, @02:17PM
The call for openness and more information is a red herring.
Vaccines aren't made in some guy's bathtub with no oversight, procedure, or quality control and their mechanism of action isn't a trade secret or a mystery.
Side effects are not hidden, they are required to be listed as well as a code that is traceable to when, where, and which specific batch that dose came from.
The Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System records every single adverse event that could even be tangentially associated with vaccination and the events can be reported or searched by anyone.
https://wonder.cdc.gov/vaers.html [cdc.gov]
https://vaers.hhs.gov/reportevent.html [hhs.gov]
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 12 2018, @12:33PM
Bullshit.
There is much more information available for and QC inspection of vaccines than small molecule drugs.
http://www.who.int/biologicals/vaccines/regulation_and_quality_control_vaccines/en/ [who.int]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccine_Adverse_Event_Reporting_System [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_vaccine_ingredients [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_manufacturing_practice [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_laboratory_practice [wikipedia.org]
https://extranet.who.int/prequal/sites/default/files/documents/Vx%20inspections.pdf [who.int]