prisoner of the flesh's dilemma

[vito_excalibur]

So jedusor posted about vaccinations and I was thinking about them.

Okay, let's take a look at just one set. Let's look at the MMR vaccine. That's measles, mumps, and rubella.

If you give your kid the MMR vaccine, they have less than a one in a million chance of getting seriously ill or dying (encephalitis). Call it one in a million.

If your kid gets

Comments

[shoutingboy]

This 'minds me of an argument I waded into once upon a time. A fellow who was, I think, on the side of the angels, was ranting about the anti-vax people. But the argument he made, over and over, was "there's no mechanism by which mercury/thimerosol could cause autism".

Now, if he'd said "there's absolutely no evidence that it causes autism", and tossed in "and we have no other reason to think it could do that, because we don't know of any mechanisms by which it would cause autism"--I'd have had no quarrel. But his argument really was "there's no mechanism, therefore it can't happen." And this struck me as crankery marshalled against crankery. Because "there's no mechanism" only means "we're not aware of a mechanism", and there's a lot we're not aware of.

It reminded me of an article I read about an HIV-doesn't-cause-AIDS crank, who was actually a tenured biochemist (if memory serves). His argument was also, in large part, "we don't know the mechanism by which it would cause those effects"--and he took that to mean "therefore it ain't doing that, and AZT (or possibly MSG, or just maybe ZOG) is causing the disease".

[kcatalyst]

I hate it when crankery is deployed against crankery! Perhaps even more than the original crankery. And there's a lot of it in vaccine discussions. I've started summarizing such arguments as "I'm using science, because I'm arguing for vaccines, and vaccines are MADE of science! Therefore I'm logical and you're a crank!"

[vito_excalibur]

"Apparently you don't understand science!"

[kcatalyst]

*laugh* Exactly!

[shoutingboy]

It is a glorious day... FOR SCIENCE!

[angelbob]

Yeah, that's wrong just on the face of it.

Mercury poisoning can and does cause autism-like symptoms (and thus, by our definition, autism) in large amounts. What he means is that there's a mechanism in general, but thimerosal in vaccines just isn't enough mercury (and the wrong kind of mercury? I forget) to cause that by itself.

A lot of these arguments are hard for exactly that reason -- "I can't imagine a reason that would happen" is different from "that doesn't happen." Or my favorite way of phrasing it, "truth is stranger than fiction because fiction has to make sense."

[vito_excalibur]

Yep. There basically isn't thimerosal anymore in vaccines for kids under six, and it's ethylmercury, not the really poisonous variation which is methylmercury.

[rebbyribs]

It reminded me of an article I read about an HIV-doesn't-cause-AIDS crank, who was actually a tenured biochemist (if memory serves).

That would be Peter Duesberg.

[shoutingboy]

Yup, that was the gentleman in question!

[irontongue]

Peter Duesberg did a lot of important work on retroviruses before going off the deep end into HIV denialism and bizarre homophobic accusations about drug use being the cause of AIDS, etc. His arguments centered around legitimate questions about why for so many there was a long, long time period between infection and symptoms. He read this to mean it couldn't possibly be HIV. But at some point in the 90s, the science around HIV had advanced to the point that just what the virus was doing between infection and symptoms became known.