More Vaccine Fearmongering

Seth Mnookin's The Panic Virus is an excellent overview of the vaccine/autism arguments that raged for many years (and rage still in the heads of the ignorant - sorry, it's gotten to the point where there's no reason to spare anyone's feelings about this issue). Now in this post at PLOS Blogs, he's alerting people to another round of the same stuff, this time about the HPV vaccine:

Over a period of about a month, (Katie Couric's) producer and I spoke for a period of several hours before she told me that the show was no longer interesting in hearing from me on air. Still, I came away from the interaction somewhat heartened: The producer seemed to have a true grasp of the dangers of declining vaccination rates and she stressed repeatedly that her co-workers, including Couric herself, did not view this as an “on the one hand, on the other hand” issue but one in which facts and evidence clearly lined up on one side — the side that overwhelmingly supports the importance and efficacy of vaccines.

Apparently, that was all a load of crap.

Read on for more. One piece of anecdotal data trumps hundreds of thousands of patients worth of actual data, you know. Especially if it's sad. Especially if it gets ratings.

Source: In the Pipeline - December 4, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: Autism Source Type: blogs