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Texas Lawmaker not Worried about Measles because of ‘Antibiotics'

posted by mrpg on Thursday February 28 2019, @04:11AM   Printer-friendly
from the Brawndo-Has-What-Plants-Crave dept.

DannyB writes:

Texas lawmaker says he's not worried about measles outbreak because of ‘antibiotics'

Texas state representative Bill Zedler says a resurgence of measles across the U.S. isn't worrying him.

Zedler, R-Arlington, is promoting legislation that would allow Texans to opt out of childhood vaccinations.

“They want to say people are dying of measles. Yeah, in Third World countries they’re dying of measles,” Zedler said, the Texas Observer reports. “Today, with antibiotics and that kind of stuff, they’re not dying in America.”

There is no treatment for measles, a highly contagious virus that can be fatal. Antibiotics treat bacterial infections and can't kill viruses.

It could be funny if it weren't so tragic.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 01 2019, @12:23AM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 01 2019, @12:23AM (#808476)

    Mate, let's set the things clear.
    [...]
    If you don't vaccinate and get measles, your immune system will know measles by heart but forget everything else. The result is most of subsequent infections with other germs will require antibiotics and you may get extremely unlucky and catch one resistant to antibiotics.

    You scenario is just speculation based on post-hoc fit model. I looked at that paper here [soylentnews.org]. Nothing wrong with it other than no one ever checked any predictions it makes (and the authors are confused between pre-diction and post-diction which makes them way overconfident in it, but whatever since it is difficult to find real science these days so I give them a pass for at least coming up with a model).

    Do you know about someone later verifying this model is capable of predicting something useful? Or do you just believe every random model that gets published? How do you decide what to believe? Because I assure you a contradictory model that fits all the same data is possible.

  • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday March 01 2019, @12:34AM (1 child)

    by c0lo (156) on Friday March 01 2019, @12:34AM (#808483) Journal

    Do you know about someone later verifying this model is capable of predicting something useful?

    Nope.

    Or do you just believe every random model that gets published? How do you decide what to believe?
    Nope. Only those that pass my guts tests. Until someone certifies them.
    Do you have any other heuristic? Because any choice in this regard is gonna be a heuristic.

    Because I assure you a contradictory model that fits all the same data is possible.

    Shoot, let's see it.

    --
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 01 2019, @12:42AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 01 2019, @12:42AM (#808488)

      No, I'm not going to spend the time on this. But if you have ever modeled something you know it is not hard to get a fit to anything with enough adjustable parameters...

      If I were to do it though, I would take their model (if it is actually available somewhere) and add in "dark measles" cases (the 85% unreported ones) that make it show what I want.

  • (Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Friday March 01 2019, @05:50PM

    by hendrikboom (1125) on Friday March 01 2019, @05:50PM (#808806) Homepage Journal

    Do you know about someone later verifying this model is capable of predicting something useful?

    Let's see. To do a double-blind study of this you would have to give measles to one group and not give measles to a control group without the subjects or the researcher knowing which group had measles.

    I kind of suspect that it might rapidly become obvious which subjects were in one group or the other...