Fantastic hats that only live on the heads of women on the upper Eastside.
Former NIH director, Dr. Bernadine Healy says that the government is purposely not studying the connection between vaccines and autism.
Read what happened to Dooce on the Today Show.
(fixed the link, sorry)
Apt. 11d 
For example: why in the past decade hasn’t the government compared the autism/ADD rate of unvaccinated children with that of vaccinated children? If the rate is the same, it tends to point away from vaccines. If the rate is markedly lower in unvaccinated children, it tends to point toward vaccines.
Sigh. It doesn’t even begin to do that. This is why “investigative correspondents” shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near epidemiology, at least not until they receive a lesson on negative-slope counterfactuals.
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“Sigh. It doesn’t even begin to do that. This is why “investigative correspondents” shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near epidemiology, at least not until they receive a lesson on negative-slope counterfactuals.”
uhh huh. I’m not an epidemiologist, but have been following this debate as an interested observer and I would like to see the studies that this reporter says Healy says show a potential link between vaccines and autism. From the point of view of a knowledgeable observer I see a multi-headed hydra of a vaccine link that sports new heads every time the scientists cut one down, and they’ve cut down every single one.
Yes, the epidemiologists are very worried about people not vaccinating their children, a choice that has significant health risks for the children and the general population. But, if there was any credible evidence of a link, I think they have no desire to cause autism in 1% of the children in order to protect the others.
I’ve often thought that people assuming that the doctors would make this choice is not particularly different from thinking that they would do experiments on minority populations in order to serve some other greater good function. It’s the same anti-scientific, anti-scientist, anti-government attitude, coming from different people.
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“I’ve often thought that people assuming that the doctors would make this choice is not particularly different from thinking that they would do experiments on minority populations in order to serve some other greater good function.”
There have historically been many highly unethical scientific and public health projects–the Nazi scientists, tens of thousands of eugenically motivated forcible sterilizations in the US (and in Sweden, I believe) in the early 20th century, the Stanford prison experiment, the experiment where volunteers were encouraged to give what they thought were dangerous electric shocks, etc. At the risk of triggering the Godwin principle, I remember hearing that half of German doctors were members of the Nazi party, making medicine a profession with one of the highest percentages of party membership. There are also unethical freelancers, like my mom’s OB who went on to perform a sterilization on a Latina mother of a large family without the woman’s knowledge but was turned in by a nurse.
I like doctors, medical researchers and vaccines as much as the next person, but there is a history that’s worth paying attention to.
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True, doctors and scientists are certainly no better than other people, and no more deserving of blind trust than any other group of people.
The problem, though, is that they can have expertise that makes trust the only way to know that a question has been answered properly. That is, there are only a small number of people who can really de-tangle the epidemiological analysis necessary to show (or not show) any link between an intervention and an outcome. Expertise matters, and for some of these calculations, most of us are never going to be able to understand what made the scientist conclude that there’s a “statistically significant” link between x and y. These links, though are going to have to govern policy making on many complex decisions.
We cannot avoid trusting. We can’t deal with unethical ob-gyn’s by doing the cesareans ourselves, and we can’t deal with unethical epidemiologists by doing the statistics ourselves. But, how do the scientists build the trust? and how do we learn to trust the right people? (without, for example, just trusting those who tell us what we want to hear).
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Even those of us who do understand the stats don’t have the time to look into everything ourselves. That said, you’d think the media could hire some people who understand their beat.
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“That said, you’d think the media could hire some people who understand their beat.”
And while were at it, how about hiring some education beat reporters who understand education issues and aren’t so easily bamboozled.
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bj,
If you’re still out there, I have an off-topic question for you as a science person. I was out chatting with the neighbors last night, and the subject of alarmingly early puberty came up. As far as I can gather from the euphemistic girl-talk, one of them had a daughter who had started menstruating around 8, and that seems to be not unusual. My neighbors were putting it on the use of hormones in the meat and dairy industries, and were discussing how to obtain inexpensive grass-fed beef. Any thoughts?
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