As is your wont, you basically nailed it.

I've somehow developed an interest in conspiracy theories over the last several years - that's a lot of what drew me to the whole birther issue. Generally, I fall on the side of the official explanations, but in some cases I can at least understand where some of the questions come from.

For example, while I tend to believe that Lee Harvey Oswald acted on his own, I can see where questions about his ability to make the shots he'd have to have made with the accuracy he did and from the range he did come from. Likewise, I get why people might be suspicious about whether a single bullet could do as much damage as the "magic bullet" did, or why they might wonder about how Jack Ruby was able to get close enough to Lee to murder him. But none of that convinces me that the mafia, Cuba or the CIA were involved in Kennedy's death.

I can also understand why some people have questions about some aspects of 9/11 - not the "remote-control planes were crashed and the government hid/killed all the passengers themselves" or "the buildings collapsed because the government rigged them to do so" crap (to me, that's just bizarre) - but smaller things like why it took Bush so long to respond (which I tend to chalk up to his just being an idiot, but I can see where others might see something a bit sinister to it) or how Al Qaeda managed to pick a day when most of our air defence fleet was engaged in an exercise and not available to respond to an emergency could make them suspicious. And, the government DID tell us a lot of lies about what they knew and when they knew it in the run up to 9/11 - which I can see leading some to question if maybe they *did* actually allow it to happen so they could the war. Yet, again, while I understand the questions, they don't convince me that the government was complicit. (Another factor in both my rejection of JFK and 9/11 conspiracy theories even though I can understand why the questions exist is that no one who has real proof has stepped forward, and there'd be too many involved for there not to be more than a few who'd be willing to step forward.)

Now, when it comes to stuff like birtherism, the moon landing or the idea that vaccines cause autism*, I don't get where those questions come from. We have FAR too much information showing that all three theories are complete bunk for me to ascribe any rationality to those who still question them.

In this case, though, I can really easily believe that there is some kind of conspiracy, and that its the kind of thing that requires few enough people that it's plausible no one has spoken out about it. Issues like what we're seeing now with the fomenting of birther beliefs, the rise of the "Tea Party" and so forth are things that that don't take a lot of people to get started. You just need people who have access to media outlets (or the money to buy space, if necessary) that are willing to run ANYthing as long as it promotes their ideological agenda and is likely to attract the attention of people too stupid to know better, and who will then repeat the claims to everyone they know. Like a forest fire started by an arsonist, once the flames start spreading, it can be difficult to determine exactly where it was started or by whom.

Hmmm.... it tells me I'm not authorized to view that forum.

TW, you have to join that user group to see it, which you can do via the user controls

Thanks!!

Thanks. Will do.

Actually, "vaccines cause autism" came from a study published in a legitimate medical journal. Unfortunately, the study itself was a complete fraud. The disgrace responsible, Andrew Wakefield, even sought to profit from his fraud. Even prior to the recent exposure of the study as a complete fraud, it had never been corroborated and all but discredited, but one can forgive naive people for falling for a hoax when it is published in The Lancet.

Perhaps initially, but even then, there were a number of indications that the study was problematical, and while parents might not have been able to make a well-informed, critical analysis of the information, from what I've read (especially in "The Panic Virus," though from other sources as well) their doctors DID have access to information that they should have been able to use to help calm concerned and/or naive parents and give them solid guidance in a matter as serious as the need for immunization - not just for the individual, but also to help maintain "herd immunity."

This is from the book regarding that paper and how it was presented to the public (emphasis added):

Of course, the media focused more on what came out of the press conference rather than what was actually printed in the journal, but The Lancet, while going ahead and publishing the paper (full text of study at link, free registration required to access,) tried to make it clear (at least to other scientists reading the journal) that this was very preliminary information only. Also of interest, in looking at the charts associated with the paper, it lists when the subject received the MMR vaccine, how long after the vaccine was given did the parents first note behavioural problems, and the age of onset for both the behavioural and bowel problems. Now, Wakefield's theory was that the MMR caused bowel problems, and the bowel problems caused the autism, which caused the behaviour problems. Yet in the study - which only involved 12 subjects - 4 of them exhibited the behavioural problems at least 3 months prior to exhibiting any bowel problems, 5 more list "not known" for the onset of the bowel problems and one has nothing listed for the onset of bowel problems. One exhibited onset of both behavioural and bowel problems simultaneously, and only ONE subject actually had bowel problems before they had behavioural problems. Now, I'm not a scientist, but it would appear to me that if the theory is that physical damage to the bowel causes not only the bowel symptoms but also is the mechanism by which the toxic substances that lead to behavioural issues are able to reach the brain, then shouldn't those bowel problem be observable BEFORE the behavioural ones?

In any event, as it became clearer that no other studies could demonstrate a link between the MMR vaccine, leaky guts and toxins crossing the blood-brain barrier, a shift much like how the birthers went from "not born in Hawaii" to "not eligible because his dad wasn't a US citizen" took place, and focus moved from the idea that the vaccine caused gut-damage resulting in developmental disabilities to focusing on the use of Thimerasol as a preservative in the MMR vaccines. Part of the problem, however, was that concerns about the use of mercury in Thimerasol was generally predicated on known problems related to exposure to methylmercury, when Thimerasol used ethylmercury. (Mnookin offered a nice analogy about the differences between ethyl- and methyl- mercury: Alcohol can come in ethanol - or ethyl-alcohol - which is what most of us drink, or methanol - which is methyl-alcohol - that can cause serious toxic effects if ingested including blindness or death.) By conflating the properties of the more toxic methylmercury with the safer ethylmercury, it unnecessarily heightened fears surrounding the vaccines.

Even with that conflation, however, it wasn't long before the US and UK governments began removing Thimersol from vaccines, and by 2004 (IIRC) there were no more vaccines being given that contained any Thimerisol at all. Yet rather than dropping, the rates of autism diagnoses are still increasing. If Thimerasol was the culprit - or even "a" culprit - that fact alone should have caused even true believers to question their beliefs. In addition, a study was done in Denmark where - because of they way there vaccination laws are structured - scientists were able to compare three groups of children: Those who had been vaccinated with Thimerasol-containing vaccines, those who were given Thimerasol-free vaccines and those who were unvaccinated. The study showed no statistical difference between the three groups in terms of the rate of autism diagnoses.

My point in all of this is that while it might have been reasonable to have questions when the study was first published in 1998, that time has long passed. Even the original study that started the whole mess wasn't nearly as disconcerting if looked at closely, and was thoroughly debunked several years ago, and as with any good conspiracy theory, when the first hypothesis evaporated, there were new ones to fill it's place. Sadly, the misinformation attributable to the belief that vaccines can cause autism has already killed some children - both ones whose parents opted not to vaccinate them out of fear of the vaccine itself - and who then contracted one of the diseases they would have been protected against - and ones who weren't yet old enough to be given any vaccines and got sick because other children in their neighbourhoods weren't vaccinated and communities are beginning to lose their herd immunity.

Not only is believing that vaccines cause autism unreasonable based on years of scientific evidence (and confirmed in the Omnibus Vaccine Court proceeding regarding autism claims,) but it's also deadly.

Thanks, thorswitch, for a major contribution to understanding how this pseudo-scientific garbage came to cause real harm. As might have been expected, Dr. Wakefield is now even more of a hero to his ardent followers than he was before his paper was revealed to be a fraud. The same thing has happened in Birferstan: fraud is uncovered, and that very act causes believers to become more entrenched.

Exactly - I think that's one of the things I found most fascinating about the book is how similar the psychology and belief-patterns of the "vaccines causes autism" movement and the birthers are.

Oh, and there was one thing I wanted to include but forgot to mention: Wakefield's initial press conference was NOT put together by the publishers of The Lancet, but rather by the Royal Free Hospital, where he worked at the time. So the journal tried to put the paper in a more responsible context of something that was very preliminary, and the Hospital - by having all of the presenting scientists agree ahead of time to focus on the message that the study wasn't strong enough to make any changes to how parents vaccinated their children or to the public policy of vaccination - tried to ensure that the study would not be misinterpreted, Wakefield went rogue and made sure the panic button got pushed and the media followed his lead without trying to verify his information. Knowing now that he had tried to get a patent on a single-dose measles vaccine formula (the kind of thing parents concerned about giving their children the combined MMR jab just might want to be able to choose as an alternative,) it seems fairly clear to me that his overall goal was to create a panic and get rich off of it.

Mnookin has an interesting story in his book about Wakefield's attitude towards his research. Apparently, he'd been having some trouble getting financial backing for his work and, according to Brian Deer - an investigative journalist who did a significant amount of the investigative journalism that eventually led to the disclosures about Wakefield's dubious motives and questionable research - in the early 90's, Wakefield

Personally, while I doubt the law would actually allow it, I would love it if "Dr." Wakefield could be charged with the death of any child who either is the children of parents who - because of the panic Wakefield started - opted not to vaccinate their children (though, realistically, the parents also share a significant part of the burden, IMO, because the information that vaccines don't cause autism is so readily available now) and they caught one of the diseases they should have been vaccinated against, and even moreso, the deaths of any children too young to be given vaccines or who are unable to tolerate vaccines, and who are killed by a preventable disease that was brought into their community by a child who's parents refused to vaccinate them. But then again, I can be a pretty vindictive bitch when I think someone's greed has put lives in unnecessary jeopardy.

I fully agree that believing in the imaginary vaccine/autism link is now birfer level stupid. Even before the exposure of Wakefield as a total fraud, it had become at least somewhat unreasonable, with most of its proponents stupid celebrities with no expertise whatsoever. (Yeah, I'm lookin' at your dumb ass, Jim Carrey.)

I know two couples with severely autistic children. Nobody has ever been able to explain to them exactly why their children are autistic, but both of them have sometimes heard the equivalent of "it's something you did or failed to do." That guilt trip is impossibly painful to bear. So I have fully understood the lure of blaming something like a vaccine for these tragedies. Even though these parents have no hope of getting monetary compensation from the vaccine manufacturer, this false belief must be strangely comforting. I think it is functionally very much the same as blaming "the gods" or witchcraft. Dante would create a special level of Hell for a physician who cynically fed that thinking for his own profit or fame.

I have a personal theory, which I borrowed from other people, of course. There are people with smart, geeky genes. If you have enough but not too many of these genes, you get really smart. But if you have too many, they cause serious problems. Evidence? Not much. But areas where smart, geeky people seem to get together, like Silicon Valley, have a near epidemic of autism.

The kind of people who moved to Silicon Valley to work with computers are, perhaps, the sort of people who, in earlier times, became celibate monks and studied and transcribed ancient texts. Now, they not only have money, they have female counterparts. So, it is curious that a group of people, many of whom probably are on the autism spectrum, with Asperger's at least, get together and suddenly there's an autism epidemic in Silicon Valley.

Anyway, try to swing a cat in a high tech city without hitting someone without an autistic child. Or maybe don't try. I think people in that kind of city might sue you if you hit them with a dead cat. I withdraw that suggestion.

This certainly isn't due to amounts of mercury smaller than you get by eating a can of albacore tuna or by eating a swordfish steak.

Dr. Wakefield is being treated as a hero and martyr by his followers. This recent interview claims that Wakefield is leading a paradigmatic shift in medical thinking about health, disease, and vaccines. He is the equivalent of Galileo in this. Video interview:
http://naturalnews.tv/v.asp?v=0CDBE1A9930CC8A14EEEB139A183D8C9

If you want to really understand Autism and Aspergers, take a look at Thinking in Pictures by Dr Temple Grandin, a woman who is Autistic.

You can read the first chapter here http://www.grandin.com/inc/visual.thinking.html

Basically, her contention is that far from Aspergers being a disability, it has served Humanity well. The guy who invented the wheel or the spear was probably sitting apart from the tribe who was having a party while he was sitting apart from the tribe, fascinated by playing with rocks and spears. She mentions couple with Aspergers she knows whos idea of a romantic evening is to have a dinner by candelight and talk about computer programs. Basically, she says Autism happens when the Asperger's gene goes too far.

She is actually afraid that anything that "cures" autism would actually screw humanity in the long run.

It's kinda of personal as I am probably an undiagnosed Aspie. Along with severe dyslexia. And a friend who has it thinks I also have ADD. I had a fun childhood.

I caught a piece of an NPR show last week and one of the listeners complained that she thought that the show would have been better if there had been someone on to represent Dr Wakefield's point of view. The presenter, Diane Rehm, responded "that is is prescisely what I did not want to do" and in the ensuing discussion one of her guests made the point that some theories had been so thoroughly debunked that it would be dishonest to give the impression that they were worth considering by having an advocate on. Another example he said would be the birther movement!

I know about Temple Grandin and greatly admire her for her occupation and her vocation. I have a third friend whose son was diagnosed with Asperger's in his infancy, and I had a diagnosed student several years ago. Both have achieved rather amazing things in their 20's.

The two couples that I mentioned are not the parents of Asperger's children. Their kids function at the other end of the spectrum. For those children, it is a true disability.

I would be very surprised if a single gene is responsible for all forms of autism and if a "too far" manifestation of Asperger's produces what these two kids deal with. I suspect that we are lumping together along one spectrum a set of conditions with different causes. We used to be of that understanding about cancer, but now we know there are many cancers with many different causes. The same thing may apply, for example, to the disease that we know as schizophrenia. It may be many different diseases with different etiologies. One of the things that science has historically done is complicate our understanding of things.

Loh - That's interesting about hi-tech areas having a higher level of autism than most others - it kind of goes with what Suranis said about the potential of people with Aspergers' to help advance society because of the way they look at things differently and don't get caught up in the same social needs "normals" (in relative terms - "normal" is pretty damn hard to define with humans!) have, if that makes sense.

Tol - and IMO, the people who venerate Wakefield are just as misguided and potentially dangerous as those who consider Orly, Berg, Walt, Lakin, the Loose Change guys and do forth as "great American heroes" who are going to "save the republic" and "restore the Constitution." (Lea - just a side note, while I know you consider Berg to be a friend and are currently a client of his, I don't include you in this group because you're current affiliation with him is *not* based on his birther beliefs. Granted, I'd love to see you find a different lawyer for your case, primarily because I don't think Berg is serving you well and I think you deserve a more honest and ethical attorney, but also because any kind of support keeps him "in the game" as it were. Still, I recognize that you are not a supporter of his birther work, and that's the only thing I'm referring to here.)

There are some people now claiming they have some kind of evidence that Wakefield is "innocent" of the fraud charges, though I wonder why they couldn't have discovered this proof until AFTER he was not only stripped of his license, had his original Lancet paper pulled and thoroughly discredited, had a newer paper using monkeys as test subjects that purported to show a link between MMR and Autism pulled from a journal that had been prepared to publish it (and had posted a pre-publication version of it on their website, though I don't have the URL right off hand,) AND shown to not only have engaged in medical fraud but also as having a HUGE conflict of interest as the result of his plans to try and market his own measles vaccines (and possibly other single-agent vaccines) so as to best take advantage of the crisis HE caused.

Welsh Dragon - That's great about the birther comparison. Mnookin brought that up in his book, and the more I read, the more amazed I was at just how apt a comparison it is - not just in terms of how well debunked the theories are, but also in the mindset of the people who insist on holding to both views. It really is quite fascinating.

Wakefield Gives Proof: No Fraud. Brian Deer Lied.
Brian Deer's 'Wakefield Fraud' Report Is Full of Misrepresentations
Is this the sort of evidence being provided that Wakefield did not commit fraud? It's not a scientific reply by Wakefield to the serious charges that led to withdrawal of the papers. It is an attack upon the reporter and upon Lancet. At this point, I would not believe Andrew Wakefield if he told me the sun had risen.

Yeah, that's the kind of stuff I've been seeing - and I wouldn't trust anything he said, either!

Ugh. The vaccine thing drives me nuts.

The Lancet certainly has egg on it's face over that one. Though, if you simply read the study methodology and understood biostats, it was easy to see that Wakefield's study and conclusions were a reach (at best) even if they weren't fraudulent.

In fairness, Wakefield wasn't the originator of the vaccine-autism link, he just facilitated it. Now, he not only lost his medical license but is in prison. He is viewed as a martyr to the flat-earth vaccines cause autism crowd.

Physicians are in a tough spot in the world, you can take all the evidence based medicine in the world and show it to patients and still lose out to a former Playboy bunny who became famous for fart jokes and believes that her son is the only person in the history of the disease to be cured of autism (Occam's Razor suggests he was simply misdiagnosed).

Aside from the fact that America's scientific literacy is horrible, is the respectable underlying neurosis that parents have of harming their child. I can respect that.

I have no respect for the dishonest hucksters that perpetuate this myth for whatever reason (profit being the main one, I suppose).

There is real harm here. Pertussis has killed at least nine children in California. It is doubtful that pertussis would have made a comeback if children were being properly immunized.

Or Tom Cruise/The Church of $camotology's crusade against psychiatric medicine. Who in the hell is Tom Cruise to comment on the legitimacy of psychiatric diagnosis? He doesn't even have a bachelor's degree and simply "studying the issue itself" doesn't make a person an expert. Especially in hard science fields. If you don't understand neurology, you can't really understand psychiatry. I suspect "self study" = reading $camotology propaganda.

What's even more galling is that, the "Church" of $camotology's suggested alternative to psychiatric medicine is so laughable and unscientific that it's not even something that is worth mocking.

Sorry if there are Scientologists on this board. I respect an individuals personal beliefs, but I find the upper echelons of the "Church" to be sinister and nefarious.

It's been a year, so it seemed appropriate to bump this.

One of the wing bats I look for, Lawrence Sellin (formerly of Canada Free Press and the Pest and eFail), has made an appearance as a "guest columnist"

At Accuracy in Media. The same outfit that Richard Mellon Scaife helped fund to spread the Vince Foster murder lies and myths.

How very.......interesting

At the very least, the Arkansas Project sewed the seeds for the swiftboaters and birthers,