Comments on: Michele Bachmann, anti-vax ignoramus

By: FrodeSvendsen

FrodeSvendsen — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 11:40:00 +0000

Give it up, she was arguing her point from anecdotal evidence. She was trying to justify her position by playing on our heartstrings and failed miserably. Or at least, with most of us..

By: FrodeSvendsen

FrodeSvendsen — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 11:37:00 +0000

Nobody is claiming that scientists are infallible, that’s pretty much the antithesis to science. Science is mutable and ever changing. But at the moment, vaccines have been proven to be the best weapon we have against horrible, crippling diseases, as Antinous demonstrates. Are those results controversial, in your mind?

By: Brainspore

Brainspore — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 19:19:00 +0000

Even ignoring the minimal but non-zero health risks of the vaccine, what justifies paying the high cost of a patent-protected vaccine for something that only improves your odds by a bit more than 2 in 3?

How about the thousands and thousands of women who WON’T die of a horrible disease every year if they get the vaccine?If you think a vaccine is expensive then you’ve clearly never seen what end-of-life treatment for someone dying of cancer is like. Even if you’re completely immune to the suffering of others, a vaccine that prevents cancer just makes good economic sense.

By: hinten

hinten — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 16:45:00 +0000

I don’t know why everyone is so upset at this politician.
There is nobody else to blame but the good, salt & earth, folks from Minnesota.

By: Lobster

Lobster — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 14:12:00 +0000

I have also never met a man who was successfully treated for cervical cancer.

By: Lobster

Lobster — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 14:11:00 +0000

Same old story. It all amounts to, “if women have sex, they deserve cervical cancer.”

By: Abe Lincoln

Abe Lincoln — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 12:31:00 +0000

Excuse me… before you get too sanctimonious perhaps you ought to do a wee bit of research into the “Lyme’s Disease” vaccine, why it was discontinued and why most doctors that have any stock left will, more or less, refuse to give it to you. Not every vaccine that comes on the market is “safe and effective”. I presume you’ve heard of Vioxx as well. You don’t prove by example you only disprove by example. So yes… a great many vaccines are safe and effective. That’s not all of them.

By: Abe Lincoln

Abe Lincoln — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 12:24:00 +0000

“Since she’s not an ignoramus,…”
Res Ipsa Loquitur?

By: Frederic Autechaud

Frederic Autechaud — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 09:23:00 +0000

Here in France, we have a growing number of cases involving post-vaccine illness. A vaccine triggers a response of the immune system and can kickstart muscular degradation on a percentage of the recipients. Why the political bias on this ? http://www.rue89.com/2009/04/2…

By: bwcbwc

bwcbwc — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 02:37:00 +0000

From what I’ve read, the vaccine isn’t particularly effective either. It’s effective against the varieties of HPV that are targeted, but according to the CDC, about 30% of cancers are not prevented by the vaccine:
“What does the vaccine not protect against?

The vaccines do not protect against all HPV types— so they will
not prevent all cases of cervical cancer. About 30% of cervical cancers
will not be prevented by the vaccines, so it will be important for
women to continue getting screened for cervical cancer (regular Pap
tests).”
- http://www.cdc.gov/std/hpv/stdfact-hpv-vaccine-young-women.htm

So there’s a bit of cost-benefit analysis missing here. Even ignoring the minimal but non-zero health risks of the vaccine, what justifies paying the high cost of a patent-protected vaccine for something that only improves your odds by a bit more than 2 in 3? I suspect the reason that the manufacturer is lobbying so hard now is because there is a broad spectrum vaccine in the pipeline and they want their money while they can get it.

By: efemmeral

efemmeral — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 02:35:00 +0000

C’mon, Michele Backmann didn’t need to actually say the vaccine caused mental retardation; she only needed to imply it. Like all good cowards she used inference to imply what she could not say with credibility. This is exactly the sort of twisted modus operandi we should expect from a woman who owns and operates ”Christian Counseling” clinics.

By: bklynchris

bklynchris — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 01:24:00 +0000

per your last statement, right on, I’ve been preaching this for years here and sadly, it is all too often a binary discussion.

By: bklynchris

bklynchris — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 01:22:00 +0000

He’s right, redwing, has absolutely nothing to do with Bachman.

By: bklynchris

bklynchris — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 01:16:00 +0000

Yes, but you were not being required by law (or in order to attend public school) to be vaccinated for HPV, only women were.

By: Antinous / Moderator

Antinous / Moderator — Sun, 18 Sep 2011 21:47:00 +0000

What harm is there in being cautious? Vaccines are big money for Big Pharma, why should we blindly trust experts that have a vested interest in these vaccines coming into wide use?

You mean besides the eradication of smallpox? And the near-eradication of polio? And the decrease in morbidity and mortality from measles, etc?

If Jenny McCarthy had been around fifty years earlier, we would still have rampant polio and smallpox.

By: grimc

grimc — Sun, 18 Sep 2011 21:42:00 +0000

So she didn’t say 1 + 1 = 2, she said there was 1, then there was another, and then it was 2. Completely different.

By: michael ellis

michael ellis — Sun, 18 Sep 2011 20:43:00 +0000

Ah yes, doctors are scientists and experts in health so they never make mistakes. One just has to do a little historical research to see how often scientists, especially medical doctors, have been wrong. Anybody remember Thalidomide and pregnant mothers? How about asbestos used internally for coronary artery disease? Even experts make mistakes and blindly accepting the word of experts can result in tragedy. What harm is there in being cautious? Vaccines are big money for Big Pharma, why should we blindly trust experts that have a vested interest in these vaccines coming into wide use?

By: michael ellis

michael ellis — Sun, 18 Sep 2011 20:27:00 +0000

I wonder how many people actually saw the clip of Ms Bachmann making the comment. She didn’t say that the HPV vaccine caused retardation. What she said was that one of her supporters told her about how her daughter got the vaccine and then had a child that turned out to be retarded. Not the same thing. But we in this country do have a habit of not fully listening and of twisting words to suite our own beliefs. Not that I am a supporter of Ms Bachmann, I don’t support her, in fact I am an anarchist and think most politicians are at best corrupt. I think that we americans are too quick to demonize others that disagree with our positions. Liberals jumped on Ms. Bachmann’s comments like dogs after a bone.

By: FrodeSvendsen

FrodeSvendsen — Sun, 18 Sep 2011 18:50:00 +0000

There are numbskull’s in every political camp. Saying all left-wing people are hippies is a pretty gigantic straw-man..

By: FrodeSvendsen

FrodeSvendsen — Sun, 18 Sep 2011 18:45:00 +0000

Vaccination can only be said to be controversial if you listen to less knowledgeable persons like Jenny McCarthy and Andrew Wakefield. It is very much a science. Claiming otherwise shows a strong bias towards anecdote based science. In other words, not science..

By: Guest

Guest — Sun, 18 Sep 2011 17:16:00 +0000

Go out to Berkeley, being against Big Pharma is clearly and absolutely a left-wing thing.

By: Guest

Guest — Sun, 18 Sep 2011 17:15:00 +0000

But it’s Vaxtreme!!

By: Guest

Guest — Sun, 18 Sep 2011 17:14:00 +0000

So you’re for banning alcohol then right? Because the negative health effects are clearly defined and understood.

Your freedom sounds like a prison.

By: sja

sja — Sun, 18 Sep 2011 17:14:00 +0000

It’s culturally weird how to me BB readers are clearly cream of smart+cool people, and I adhere to the majority of the views and understandings expressed here, but when it comes to some subject, like vaccination, I feel like hearing gullible average folks.
I don’t mean to be insulting (really!), I just want to express very straightfowardly how it’d sound to me if I’d hear that kind of comments around were I live (Switzerland, as well as France, even if vaccination and healthcare are more controlled and less questionned over there).
As this vaccination subject is totally interwined with the Bachmann subject, which I don’t know anything about, I might not get the cleanest picture, but still… I didn’t read the whole thread, but somewhere I saw republican’s don’t get science, democrats don’t get economy. Here though, “vaccination” clearly would not be used as an example of “science”; it’s still experimental, known to have bound immediate risks, potential surprises in the next decades, commercial interests interfering, a history of bent statistics, etc. Vaccination is actually getting more and more controversial.
It’d be interesting if there was a study on that; the perception about vaccination, about people’s confidence in the health institutions, in different countries…

By: Guest

Guest — Sun, 18 Sep 2011 17:13:00 +0000

Lol, it was “determined” by Big Pharma that they are missing out on half their profits.

By: LightningRose

LightningRose — Sun, 18 Sep 2011 14:12:00 +0000

That’s good news. Thank you for the update.

By: cellocgw

cellocgw — Sun, 18 Sep 2011 12:44:00 +0000

Dave, you nailed it. I don’t know what’s up with that (clearly retarded :-) ) Salon writer, but wacko anti-gov’t theories certainly are not part of liberalism. And even less a part of Socialism, which seems to be the current whipping-boy of the teabaggers.

By: digi_owl

digi_owl — Sun, 18 Sep 2011 10:09:00 +0000

Well nobody in the mainstream sense understands economics, as they assume properties that can not exist in a real life system (such as equilibrium).

By: Jamie B

Jamie B — Sun, 18 Sep 2011 09:45:00 +0000

Well I think it’s for HPV, which has been linked to cervical cancer (there’s bit more to the story, as the vaccination doesn’t cover all strains for the virus, so the risk remains). That’s why only the laydeez get the vaccination. NVM, just read an update below. Please ignore this.

By: Antinous / Moderator

Antinous / Moderator — Sun, 18 Sep 2011 09:32:00 +0000

Well, in this particular case, it does really make it sound like he’s talking about rhesus monkeys rather than people. It’s one thing to refer to people as males or females with colleagues, but it sounds a bit dehumanizing outside the lab.

In the hospital it was horribly common to refer to patients by diagnosis, so Mr. Jones and Mrs. Smith would be referred to as my penectomy and my labial cyst.