The reason I’ve gone off-topic with posts about the current vaccine kerfuffle, is because it speaks so directly to the way that truthy lies of bogus science can continue to exert influence, even decades after being discredited. Particularly when financially motivated parties don’t want to let go of lies that suit their ideology.
In the churning over the refusal of some parents to immunize their children against certain diseases, a venerable Latin phrase may prove useful: Post hoc, ergo propter hoc. It means, “After this, therefore because of this.” In plainer language: Event B follows Event A, so B must be the direct result of A. It is a classic fallacy in logic.
It is also a trap into which many Americans have fallen. That is the consensus among health professionals trying to contain recent spurts of infectious diseases that they had believed were forever in the country’s rearview mirror. They worry that too many people are not getting their children vaccinated, out of a conviction that inoculations are risky.
Some parents feel certain that vaccines can lead to autism, if only because there have been instances when a child got a shot and then became autistic. Post hoc, ergo propter hoc. Making that connection between the two events, most health experts say, is as fallacious in the world of medicine as it is in the field of logic.
In 1998, an esteemed medical journal published a paper with a startling conclusion: that the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine — administered to millions of children across the globe each year — could cause autism.
This study, led by the discredited physician-researcher Andrew Wakefield, is where the current vaccine-autism debate started. It has since been thoroughly eviscerated: The Lancet retracted the paper, investigators have described the research as an “elaborate fraud,” and Wakefield has lost his medical license.
But public-health experts say that Wakefield’s false data and erroneous conclusions, while resoundingly rejected in the academic world, still drive some parents’ current worries about the MMR shot.
Typically, the M.M.R. shot is given to infants at about 12 months and again at age 5 or 6. This doctor, Andrew Wakefield, wrote that his study of 12 children showed that the three vaccines taken together could alter immune systems, causing intestinal woes that then reach, and damage, the brain. In fairly short order, his findings were widely rejected as — not to put too fine a point on it — bunk. Dozens of epidemiological studies found no merit to his work, which was based on a tiny sample. The British Medical Journal went so far as to call his research “fraudulent.” The British journal Lancet, which originally published Dr. Wakefield’s paper, retracted it. The British medical authorities stripped him of his license.
Nonetheless, despite his being held in disgrace, the vaccine-autism link has continued to be accepted on faith by some. Among the more prominently outspoken is Jenny McCarthy, a former television host and Playboy Playmate, who has linked her son’s autism to his vaccination: He got the shot, and then he was not O.K. Post hoc, etc.
So bad information stays in circulation a long time. And there is no better example of bad information based on bogus science, than what we continue to see from climate deniers like Senator James Inhofe.In his recent Senate floor rant against science, Senator Inhofe brought up a number of familiar shibboleths – what was amazing about his speech was the frozen-in-amber recitation of dusty, long-debunked talking points – points that only make well informed people sigh – but which climate deniers know – benefit from having been repeated thousands of times.
Briefly, since there was not a whole lot of paleo-reconstruction available in the late 80’s, IPCC authors used some images created by the highly regarded H.H. Lamb, an English paleo-meteorologist active in the mid 20th century. John Mashey in Desmogblog:
The 1990 scientists said the LIA was global, but they stated clear reservations about MWP as global and synchronous.
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I think Lamb (1965) was heroic work, and I own a copy of Lamb(1982), but I’d guess few deniers have studied either. Inhofe and many others have seriously misrepresented the work of this fine scientist, who was quite clear his curve described a small area of England.
(at left) Area for Central England Temperature series, the longest measured series in the world, but no earlier than 1659 at best. Gordon Manley updated this series for years.
Improved reconstruction of the world’s temperature is a great scientific detective story. It is hard work by thousands.
It is much easier to invent deceptive stories.
The Lamb curve is a flat-Earth map, but some cling to it, without ever reading IPCC(1990) pp.199-203.Some actually cite p.202, but perhaps they copied the citation without reading it.
Even with acknowledged Medieval warmth around the North Atlantic, Vikings in Greenland and grapes in England (but not as far North as today), this rectangle is not the world or even the Northern Hemisphere, no matter what some Senators think. Why would Senator Inhofe spend so much time on this deception?
Jones, et al(2009) Appendix A, p.36 gave the long history behind (the “medieval warming” figure above), and their p.34 Figure below is instructive. The blue line was an up-to-date Central England measured series. Lamb(1965, 1982) used rainfall and botanical information to estimate everything earlier (red), including all of the putative MWP. IPCC(1995) Fig.3.20, p.175 combined a much better 1993 reconstruction with modern measurements. It is good science to put both on a graph, clearly labeled, to compare overlaps, and it is done often. Inhofe(2012) p.32-33 fiercely denigrated Mann for it, while using a schematic that did the same thing, but with far less accuracy and no visual distinction. Lamb was clear in his texts, but obviously many people never read them. Even if his estimates were accurate … it is already now warmer in England, not that it actually matters to human causes of modern temperature rise.
Figure 7 The black curve and the x- and y-axes are a redrawn version of figure 7.1c from the First Working Group of IPCC Report (Folland et al., 1990). The y-axis originally had only unnumbered tick markings and was labelled ‘temperature scale’. The red curve is from Lamb (1982: figure 30, the upper (annual) curve). The amplitude of this curve has been scaled to correspond to that of the black curve. The Lamb (1982) time series does have an explicit temperature scale, and the best-fit scaling between this curve and the IPCC curve indicates that one tick-mark interval on the IPCC figure corresponds almost exactly with 1°C. The degree of smoothing for both these curves is unknown, but Lamb (1982) states that the red curve is based on 50-yr means (supported by earlier publications). The blue curve is a smoothed version of the annual instrumental Central England Temperature record from Manley (1974, updated) including the last complete year of 2007. This has been smoothed with a 50-yr Gaussian weighted filter with padding (Mann, 2004). The blue curve is plotted with the same scaling as used for the red curve, further supporting the conclusions that the red curve is based on the same data after the start of the instrumental record in 1659. The red and blue curves illustrate the differences that can occur between a filtered curve and one composed of non-overlapping 50-yr averages, and also that recent measured warming may be comparable with presumed earlier warmth
I’ve noticed in recent public talks that, as much as I try to remain current as to what the science is telling us today, the tired dusty myths of Paleo-denial keep coming up, simply because you have a lot of folks out there who just haven’t had time to pay attention. Ignorance thrives in this vaccuum.
Just as I hope we can use the current vaccine mania to educate about the real science behind our public health system, looks like I’ll have to use the coming months of Inhofe sponsored denia-paloozas in congress to re-educate on the tired denialist myths of the past. That means newer videos covering old ground.
For now, here’s my 2009 take-down of the MWP, complete with tinny sound and everything.
And here’s Peter Hadfield’s very able takedown of the trusty medieval talking point.
The anti-Vaxx movement did not take off just because of Wakefield’s bad science. In 2002, the Bush administration and the congress moved to indemnify vaccine makers from lawsuits resulting from harm caused by their vaccines. This was originally written into a bill passed by executive order and designed to protect companies making vaccines for germ warfare such as anti-smallpox or anti-anthrax formulations. The House then expanded on this and extended indemnity for a variety of other childhood vaccines. Whether people had a justifiable reason to be paranoid or not, one didn’t have to be much of a conspiracy theorist to distrust what the government was up to–and what pharma knew about its medicine. http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1957&dat=20021116&id=-HsuAAAAIBAJ&sjid=7YkFAAAAIBAJ&pg=1265,3720486
The other point, one that anti-Vaxxers are bringing up all the time, is that there are communities in the US that are not experiencing explosive growth in autism spectrum disorders among children. The Amish and Mennonite communities do not vaccinate their children to the same degree as the US population at large, and their children are not experiencing the epidemic of autism disorders that the US population at large is seeing. The people in charge here need to take the rise of these disorders seriously and start to put research money into them.
The various vaccine manufactroversies that have spread in the wake of the Andrew Wakefield’s bogus claims that the measles component of the MMR vaccine might be linked to autism are too numerous to unpack in one brief blog post. One of the most persistent has been the Amish fallacy: Most Amish don’t vaccinate; there’s almost no record of autism in Amish communities; ergo, vaccines cause autism. (This argument has also been used, time and time and time again, to illustrate the efficacy of a proposed vaccinated-versus-unvaccinated study.)
Not surprisingly, no part of the Amish fallacy — which has been kicking around for over a decade and gained new prominence and attention with this, purely anecdotal 2005 dispatch* — is true. Over the years, Ken Reibel at Autism News Beat has documented the problems with the Amish report, although the myth still persists.
Yesterday, Reuters Health reported on a recent study in Pediatrics titled “Underimmunization in Ohio’s Amish: Parental Fears Are a Greater Obstacle Than Access to Care.” The study found that majority of Amish parents do, in fact, vaccinate their children…and among the minority that don’t, the most common reasons cited were the same anti-vaccine fueled fears that have infected people around the country.
Unlike the theories propagated by anti-vaccine activists, this study was definitely not anecdotal: It was based on surveys sent to hundreds of families in Holmes County, which has a large number of Amish families. As Reuters reports, “Of 359 households that responded to the survey, 85 percent said that at least some of their children had received at least one vaccine. Forty-nine families refused all vaccines for their children, mostly because they worried the vaccines could cause harm and were not worth the risk.”
The study’s conclusions summarize the issue quite succinctly:
The reasons that Amish parents resist immunizations mirror reasons that non-Amish parents resist immunizations. Even in America’s closed religious communities, the major barrier to vaccination is concern over adverse effects of vaccinations. If 85% of Amish parents surveyed accept some immunizations, they are a dynamic group that may be influenced to accept preventative care. Underimmunization in the Amish population must be approached with emphasis on changing parental perceptions of vaccines in addition to ensuring access to vaccines.
Autism spectrum has been trending up because more and more classifications are coming into existence. Also, one of the mainstay denialist arguments was that it was the mercury based preservative that was responsible for the brain insults. Well, manufactures have been pulling out the mercury preservative and yet this has not been shown to reduce rates of Autism.
The CDC updates their recommendations every few months (these come from practitioners, not big pharma); but the main cocktails for young children have been about the same, for decades before Bush was ever president. The only thing different these days is that they get a chicken pox vaccine on top of the mainstay cocktails.
But if you want to talk mercury risks, Google USGS Mercury in Freshwater Fish or the like and look at their study on Coal Fired Pollution destroying our streams. http://water.usgs.gov/nawqa/mercury/
For the low down on the MMR brouhaha, and other medical shenanigans (Woo medicine) then Ben Godacre’s (A British GP) site Bad Science is a must visit. Here is a run down of the MMR content:
I’ve read his book ‘Bad Pharma‘. I think he makes a good case for how we all could benefit from better regulation. [Cue the free market fundamentalist nutjobs rushing to dismiss his argument.]
One issue the climate deniers haven’t dealt with is the rate of change. Their charts on the Medieval warming and the “little ice age” show changes lasting centuries. Meanwhile, climate change is moving rapidly over a few decades. This seems to escaped their attention.
Unfortunately for them the general public (who really isn’t too bright when it comes to science) need only to look out of their windows and test their limited memories and realize that something big is happening. This isn’t about a frog being killed in boiling water because the temperature is being gradually raised. It’s about an explosion in conditions. Massive blizzards, floods, droughts, heat waves, cold waves, etc. This is happening as fast as the Old Testament said the plagues of Egypt happened.
“This is happening as fast as the Old Testament said the plagues of Egypt happened” True, but unfortunately to the CC denier contingent it means Christs 2nd coming is imminent. And the faster it comes, the more imminent his return. We talk, a lot, about physical positive feedbacks, on this website. But what if Earth’s history is now hinging on emotional positive feedbacks? (which, if history is any guide, make physical feedbacks look positively ‘linear’).
Just in case there is anyone left alive who doesn’t yet know this – the chart that Inhofe is standing in front of in the picture is H.Lamb’s 1982 graph that is based almost entirely on the Central England Temperature graph and it stops in 1950 – BEFORE half of the current warming.
At the time – 1982 – it was about all we had and was used in the first IPCC report. Which is why Inhofe can claim, as he does, that it is ‘The IPCC’s graph’
Subsequent global studies of dozens of proxies have since improved our knowledge of past global temperatures out of sight.
These show that the MWP and LIA were localised events while the overall global mean temperature continued it’s slow cooling from the Holocene Climatic Optimum over 6,000 years ago. Until around 1900 that is – when the global temperature suddenly spiked, overturning the previous 6,000 years of slow cooling in decades.
My apologies to the overwhelming majority of readers here to whom this is all just basic common knowledge but I just wanted to point out to any lurkers or trolls just how infantile and insulting Inhofe’s ‘information’ truly is.
A graph that stops in 1950?!
I mean really?!!
Is that really the best the multi-billion dollar fossil-fuel lobby can come up with for the Senate?!
They are making a global laughing stock of Americans.
Peter Sinclair, bored with the usual run of the mill climate change deniers that visit his site, reaches out to a fresh pool of crazy by mentioning vaccines. I know what you’re up to 😉
Guess not. Click the link and you’ll see my poor cut-n-paste job, showing the MWP coinciding with a series of multidecade, mega-droughts in the US Southwest.
(at left) Area for Central England Temperature series, the longest measured series in the world, but no earlier than 1659 at best. Gordon Manley updated this series for years.
The anti-Vaxx movement did not take off just because of Wakefield’s bad science. In 2002, the Bush administration and the congress moved to indemnify vaccine makers from lawsuits resulting from harm caused by their vaccines. This was originally written into a bill passed by executive order and designed to protect companies making vaccines for germ warfare such as anti-smallpox or anti-anthrax formulations. The House then expanded on this and extended indemnity for a variety of other childhood vaccines. Whether people had a justifiable reason to be paranoid or not, one didn’t have to be much of a conspiracy theorist to distrust what the government was up to–and what pharma knew about its medicine.
http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1957&dat=20021116&id=-HsuAAAAIBAJ&sjid=7YkFAAAAIBAJ&pg=1265,3720486
The other point, one that anti-Vaxxers are bringing up all the time, is that there are communities in the US that are not experiencing explosive growth in autism spectrum disorders among children. The Amish and Mennonite communities do not vaccinate their children to the same degree as the US population at large, and their children are not experiencing the epidemic of autism disorders that the US population at large is seeing. The people in charge here need to take the rise of these disorders seriously and start to put research money into them.
Public Library of Science: PLOS –
http://blogs.plos.org/thepanicvirus/2011/06/28/anecdotal-amish-dont-vaccinate-claims-disproved-by-fact-based-study/
The various vaccine manufactroversies that have spread in the wake of the Andrew Wakefield’s bogus claims that the measles component of the MMR vaccine might be linked to autism are too numerous to unpack in one brief blog post. One of the most persistent has been the Amish fallacy: Most Amish don’t vaccinate; there’s almost no record of autism in Amish communities; ergo, vaccines cause autism. (This argument has also been used, time and time and time again, to illustrate the efficacy of a proposed vaccinated-versus-unvaccinated study.)
Not surprisingly, no part of the Amish fallacy — which has been kicking around for over a decade and gained new prominence and attention with this, purely anecdotal 2005 dispatch* — is true. Over the years, Ken Reibel at Autism News Beat has documented the problems with the Amish report, although the myth still persists.
Yesterday, Reuters Health reported on a recent study in Pediatrics titled “Underimmunization in Ohio’s Amish: Parental Fears Are a Greater Obstacle Than Access to Care.” The study found that majority of Amish parents do, in fact, vaccinate their children…and among the minority that don’t, the most common reasons cited were the same anti-vaccine fueled fears that have infected people around the country.
Unlike the theories propagated by anti-vaccine activists, this study was definitely not anecdotal: It was based on surveys sent to hundreds of families in Holmes County, which has a large number of Amish families. As Reuters reports, “Of 359 households that responded to the survey, 85 percent said that at least some of their children had received at least one vaccine. Forty-nine families refused all vaccines for their children, mostly because they worried the vaccines could cause harm and were not worth the risk.”
The study’s conclusions summarize the issue quite succinctly:
The reasons that Amish parents resist immunizations mirror reasons that non-Amish parents resist immunizations. Even in America’s closed religious communities, the major barrier to vaccination is concern over adverse effects of vaccinations. If 85% of Amish parents surveyed accept some immunizations, they are a dynamic group that may be influenced to accept preventative care. Underimmunization in the Amish population must be approached with emphasis on changing parental perceptions of vaccines in addition to ensuring access to vaccines.
Autism spectrum has been trending up because more and more classifications are coming into existence. Also, one of the mainstay denialist arguments was that it was the mercury based preservative that was responsible for the brain insults. Well, manufactures have been pulling out the mercury preservative and yet this has not been shown to reduce rates of Autism.
The CDC updates their recommendations every few months (these come from practitioners, not big pharma); but the main cocktails for young children have been about the same, for decades before Bush was ever president. The only thing different these days is that they get a chicken pox vaccine on top of the mainstay cocktails.
But if you want to talk mercury risks, Google USGS Mercury in Freshwater Fish or the like and look at their study on Coal Fired Pollution destroying our streams. http://water.usgs.gov/nawqa/mercury/
For the low down on the MMR brouhaha, and other medical shenanigans (Woo medicine) then Ben Godacre’s (A British GP) site Bad Science is a must visit. Here is a run down of the MMR content:
http://www.badscience.net/index.php?s=MMR
Ben Godacre’sBen Goldacre’sI’ve read his book ‘Bad Pharma‘. I think he makes a good case for how we all could benefit from better regulation. [Cue the free market fundamentalist nutjobs rushing to dismiss his argument.]
Thx for all you do
One issue the climate deniers haven’t dealt with is the rate of change. Their charts on the Medieval warming and the “little ice age” show changes lasting centuries. Meanwhile, climate change is moving rapidly over a few decades. This seems to escaped their attention.
Unfortunately for them the general public (who really isn’t too bright when it comes to science) need only to look out of their windows and test their limited memories and realize that something big is happening. This isn’t about a frog being killed in boiling water because the temperature is being gradually raised. It’s about an explosion in conditions. Massive blizzards, floods, droughts, heat waves, cold waves, etc. This is happening as fast as the Old Testament said the plagues of Egypt happened.
“This is happening as fast as the Old Testament said the plagues of Egypt happened” True, but unfortunately to the CC denier contingent it means Christs 2nd coming is imminent. And the faster it comes, the more imminent his return. We talk, a lot, about physical positive feedbacks, on this website. But what if Earth’s history is now hinging on emotional positive feedbacks? (which, if history is any guide, make physical feedbacks look positively ‘linear’).
Just in case there is anyone left alive who doesn’t yet know this – the chart that Inhofe is standing in front of in the picture is H.Lamb’s 1982 graph that is based almost entirely on the Central England Temperature graph and it stops in 1950 – BEFORE half of the current warming.
At the time – 1982 – it was about all we had and was used in the first IPCC report. Which is why Inhofe can claim, as he does, that it is ‘The IPCC’s graph’
Subsequent global studies of dozens of proxies have since improved our knowledge of past global temperatures out of sight.
These show that the MWP and LIA were localised events while the overall global mean temperature continued it’s slow cooling from the Holocene Climatic Optimum over 6,000 years ago. Until around 1900 that is – when the global temperature suddenly spiked, overturning the previous 6,000 years of slow cooling in decades.
My apologies to the overwhelming majority of readers here to whom this is all just basic common knowledge but I just wanted to point out to any lurkers or trolls just how infantile and insulting Inhofe’s ‘information’ truly is.
A graph that stops in 1950?!
I mean really?!!
Is that really the best the multi-billion dollar fossil-fuel lobby can come up with for the Senate?!
They are making a global laughing stock of Americans.
Peter Sinclair, bored with the usual run of the mill climate change deniers that visit his site, reaches out to a fresh pool of crazy by mentioning vaccines. I know what you’re up to 😉
so cynical.
Your tongue is firmly in your cheek, right? 😉
This may or may not work as an image:
https://scontent-a.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xpf1/v/t1.0-9/10609724_10152665667335350_5227997760659636143_n.jpg?oh=45daee18a8f37223d7a96c7a5f2e2833&oe=555AF30E
Guess not. Click the link and you’ll see my poor cut-n-paste job, showing the MWP coinciding with a series of multidecade, mega-droughts in the US Southwest.