The Anti Anti-Vax - Part 5 - Costs & Beliefs

The Anti-Vax crowd has been busy in the past week trying to defend the indefensible.  I'm starting to believe that they are their own worst enemies.

It started with this post: "200 Good Reasons Not to Vaccinate".  It provided a list of 361 "articles" (peer-reviewed, even) that I suppose were to convince the reader that vaccines were evil.  So I started reading over some of the references.  To my surprise, they were (at least some of them), peer-reviewed articles, but they didn't suggest that vaccines were harmful or evil.  Quite the opposite, in fact.  There were some that recommended keeping the vaccination schedule up-to-date, some that showed no link between vaccines and some purported harm, some weren't about vaccines at all.  One found redness and soreness up to 7 days after vaccination and that the side-effects were trivial and transient.  Hardly the stuff of major dangerous medical conspiracy.  On many, the title of the research report was changed to make it seem sensational.

No sooner had that passed, then there was yet another.  Same sort of thing.  Evidence that vaccines cause harm, that vaccines aren't perfect....  The references provided did not support the contention of the posted article.

These two examples are making me wonder if all these links are being provided in the secure knowledge that most people won't bother to read them.  Once they see the sensationalist headline, they post it, confirm their personal beliefs and move on, not bothering to read anything further.

Of course, there is lots of information about vaccines available, but, as I've come to realize, the anti-vaccine crowd simply doesn't believe it.  It doesn't matter where that information or evidence comes from, they label it all as a big cover-up and persist with spreading stories that porport to show how vaccines haven't worked, that they don't work, that they cause harm and that they only serve to make "Big Pharma" gobs of money.

There are costs to not vaccinating, of course.  One article went into the numbers and provided this image: 

And then there was another interesting image about costs of the anti-vaccine movement.

One good site for information is the Global Polio Eradication Initiative.  

Neuroscientist Sam Harris published an interview he had with Dr Nina Shapiro about the current state of the anti-vaccine "wars".  It can be seen here.  I would have to say that, after the past couple of months trading words with a died-in-the-wool anti-vaxxer, all the things mentioned in this article are present.  In spades.

I also ran across this site which provided real links to real studies showing, again and again, that there were no links between vaccines and autism.  It's hard to believe that, after so many years and so many studies, that this is still a thing, but there you are.  Almost every vaccine story you read has comments following that bring up mercury and autism.  It boggles the mind.

Then there is this, putting yet another spin on the "debate": 

There seems to be no end to it.  One thing remains unchanged, though:  the anti-vaccine movement seems to feel itself under attack and continues to spew out the most ridiculous claims.  Claims that are easily refuted, not that facts matter to people who can't think for themselves and only believe that they are told to believe by the leaders in the anti-vax movement.

[Update] - The small measles outbreak this year in the USA seems to have spawned a bit of a backlash against the anti-vax movement, with many more people speaking out.