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Comment by philk | Hacker News Reader

The sad thing is even though the study has been thoroughly discredited[1], it continues to hang around and be cited by anti-vaccine activists.

[1] Even sadder is that they cite Wakefield being exposed as a fraud as evidence of tampering by "Big Pharma".

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I get the impression that the tide has turned in the battle, and we should start seeing an improvement in vaccination rates over the next few years. Pity there will be a large lag as children who weren't immunized grow up and continue to get sick from these preventable diseases.

There doesn't have to be a lag; if you have not gotten or spread the disease but get your immunization late, no concrete damage has occurred. It's not like the immunizations only work when you're two, they'll work anytime.

Absolutely, but once a child has left the normal cycle of immunization either the parents or the government need to make an effort to get them up to date. IMO this by and large won't happen without either policies in place or a large public interest campaign directed at it.

Are children still accepted into schools without their vaccinations? I know when I was a kid I had to bring a card with all my shots or they wouldn't enroll me. So has this requirement been dropped?

And to get a VISA for some countries you need to bring that card.

In most US states, a parent can apply for a religious exemption that will allow them to enroll their child in school without one or more of the required immunizations. Some states even offer "philosophical" exemptions.

The National Conference of State Legislatures maintains a list of exemption statutes by state:

http://www.ncsl.org/default.aspx?tabid=14376

IIRC here in Canada you have to have all your vaccinations or by-and-large you will not be accepted into any school. However, I don't remember this being needed in the UK, but then again I remember getting shots during class time so I probably never paid enough attention because everyone got the vaccinations.

I have a two year old so have been doing the vaccination dance recently. We take her to a pediatric nurse practitioner at a rather alternative practice (they even have a shaman) and she advises getting the MMR vaccine. If the vaccine is standard there, then that is a strong indicator supporting your statement that the tides have turned.

The sad thing is that for a lot of this sort of propaganda to be effective, it don't have to prove anything; it suffices to just raise the question and spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt.

While the book doesn't touch on vaccines, I found Oreskes & Conway's "Merchants of Doubt" a fascinating read on the subject of how easy it is to spread FUD (or at least UD) about science.

Even sadder is that they cite Wakefield being exposed as a fraud as evidence of tampering by "Big Pharma".

As much as I'm convinced this guy is scum and perpetrated a cynical fraud for his own professional and monetary gain, I have to admit this is a fair accusation if you replace "Big Pharma" by the medical community as a whole. It was done with good intentions, but the way they treated the study (and Wakefield) proves that the science is subject to non-scientific considerations. Wakefield's study was accepted and published and didn't immediately cause a scandal, so there must be hundreds of published papers just as shoddy, many of them containing fraud perpetrated for an author's professional gain. Far from ending careers and discrediting ideas, the vast majority of those papers will continue to boost careers and promote their conclusions in some small way until the journals are dusty and forgotten.

Wakefield's study was singled out for special justice in order to manipulate the public debate on vaccines. It was done in the name of truth, will certainly save lives, and didn't inflict on Wakefield anything he didn't deserve. However, it was "tampering" with the normal process, it was done as propaganda, and it was also done for PR motivations, to compensate for the impression that the medical community was complicit in Wakefield's fraud by holding his science to such low standards. It isn't sad if people notice that. It's just sad that the medical community was forced to stage a show trial to put an end to Wakefield's deadly and self-serving BS.

"The sad thing is even though the study has been thoroughly discredited, it continues to hang around and be cited by anti-vaccine activists."

Unlike HN commenters constantly promoting dangerous psychiatric drugs that are no more effective than placebos, extrinsic rewards for children who read/exercise, Bill Gates' KIPP-based school reforms, the conflation of homeopathic and naturopathic medicine, using GPA for hiring, etc.

Where are the HN users you're talking about? Promoting using GPA for hiring? That doesn't sound like the anti-higher-education HN I know and love/tolerate :)

Fair enough, a lot of people in general obviously do that though. I guess my point is that I see people posting stuff here all the time that's contradicted by science, but people only call it out on socially acceptable issues.

For example, if I had a dollar for every time I saw someone on HN criticizing the methodology of a study they haven't actually read then I wouldn't be doing a startup right now. And yet these posts rarely get downvoted.

If you don't mind, can you cite an example?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2068635

7 points is not massive agreement - the first response criticizing this point has more points (as of this writing - it may have been different.)

Wait . . . there is science suggesting that using GPA as a component of hiring leads to bad outcomes? I wouldn't have thought this would be the type of thing that could be studied easily, but I'm always willing to learn.

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