And those magic wristbands don’t work, either

6 01 2011

Andrew Wakefield is a fraud—and the British Medical Journal has the evidence to prove it.

I tend to stay away from anti-vaxers, not because they don’t deserve the derision, but because there are many who are much better situated than me (see, for example, this post by Orac at Respectful Insolence) to take ’em on.

It’s not that there are no risks associated with vaccines or that no one has ever been adversely affected by vaccines—every year, for a quick example, there are people who are adversely affected by the flu vaccine who likely would have been fine without it—but one has to be clear what those risks are.

Stating that the measels, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine causes autism is not clarifying those risks.

In fact, Wakefield was not only wrong when he made that connection in a 1998 Lancet article (an article which was retracted in 2010), he was deliberately wrong, that is, he fucked with the data. As the editors of BMJ note:

The Office of Research Integrity in the United States defines fraud as fabrication, falsification, or plagiarism. Deer unearthed clear evidence of falsification. He found that not one of the 12 cases reported in the 1998 Lancet paper was free of misrepresentation or undisclosed alteration, and that in no single case could the medical records be fully reconciled with the descriptions, diagnoses, or histories published in the journal.

Who perpetrated this fraud? There is no doubt that it was Wakefield. Is it possible that he was wrong, but not dishonest: that he was so incompetent that he was unable to fairly describe the project, or to report even one of the 12 children’s cases accurately? No. A great deal of thought and effort must have gone into drafting the paper to achieve the results he wanted: the discrepancies all led in one direction; misreporting was gross. Moreover, although the scale of the GMC’s 217 day hearing precluded additional charges focused directly on the fraud, the panel found him guilty of dishonesty concerning the study’s admissions criteria, its funding by the Legal Aid Board, and his statements about it afterwards.

Furthermore, Wakefield has been given ample opportunity either to replicate the paper’s findings, or to say he was mistaken. He has declined to do either. He refused to join 10 of his coauthors in retracting the paper’s interpretation in 2004, and has repeatedly denied doing anything wrong at all. Instead, although now disgraced and stripped of his clinical and academic credentials, he continues to push his views. [emphasis added]

Again, I leave it to the medical and scientific folk to tear into Wakefield’s manipulations; I want to address the public health implications of his fraud.

BMJ’s editors note that it is difficult to trace declining vaccination rates in the UK and elsewhere directly to Wakefield’s work, but it is clear that rates had fallen after 1998, and are still below the World Health Organization’s recommended coverage of 95 percent of a population. In 2008, measles were “declared endemic in England and Wales”, and an outbreak of mumps in Essen, Germany revealed that of the 71 children affected, 68 hadn’t been vaccinated. Finally, according to a June 2009 Pediatrics article (as discussed in the Wired article linked to, above), pertussis rates jumped from 1000 in 1976 to 26,000 in 2004.

So what? So some kids get sick for awhile. Sucks for them, but that’s what they get for having anti-vax parents.

Except that it’s not fair for those kids, and it puts others at risk of morbidity and mortality. Measles can kill. Meningitis can kill. Pertussis can kill, and on and on. Furthermore, many of the diseases which can be prevented by vaccines depend on herd immunity—they work mainly by preventing a disease from settling into a reservoir in a population—which means that if enough people in any given group are unvaccinated, the disease can spread.

Again, what’s the problem? If folks don’t get themselves immunized, that’s on them.

But it’s not. There are some people—infants, transplant patients, people with compromised immune systems, those  who may be  allergic to (as I am to the egg in flu vaccines) or otherwise intolerant to ingredients in the vaccine, among others—who are vulnerable to outbreaks. And even those who have been vaccinated may be at risk if, say, an especially virulent form of a disease is allowed to spread.

So back to the beginning(ish): There are risks to vaccination, but so there are greater risks to not vaccinating, not only to yourself or your kid, but to everyone around you.

Some parents feel quite comfortable withholding vaccines from their kids, but the only reason they can safely do so is because every other parent is vaccinating her kids. And hey, guess what, if everyone else has to take the risk to keep the disease at bay, then so should the anti-vaxers. Unless they are willing to keep themselves and their kids away from everyone else for as long as they all remain unvaccinated, they are free-riding on the rest of us. They are, in a sense, ripping us off.

If you want the benefits, you have to bear the burdens.

Finally, it is worth noting, along with the editors of BMJ,that

[P]erhaps as important as the scare’s effect on infectious disease is the energy, emotion, and money that have been diverted away from efforts to understand the real causes of autism and how to help children and families who live with it.

Wakefield and Age of Autism and Generation Rescue are doing no favors for those who do have autism or their families. Jennifer McCarthy and JB Handley, parents of kids with autism, may sincerely believe their bullshit, but the sincerity of those beliefs does not make that bs any less malodorous.

Who knows, maybe there is a specific cause for autism, one which, if rooted out, could lead to the end of this syndrome.

But that cause ain’t the MMR vaccine.


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I’m a rocket man

14 12 2010

I try to be good, get off the computer for a few hours, and what happens? I miss an entire conversation on science.

Well, goddammit.

(Actually, given that a large portion of the thread was given over to name-calling and trollist cavils, I guess I didn’t miss that much. Still.)

So, science. I am for it.

I am an epistemological nihilist, it’s true, so this support is caveated with the usual cracks and abyssals, but I’m also quite willing to hop right over those chasms to walk among the ruins that compose our human life—and one of our more spectacular ruins is science.

Yes, ‘our’. ‘Our’ because science truly is a human endeavor (even as its dogmatists assert that science can take us outside of ourselves), and as such, there to be claimed by all of us. And it is important to claim it, both against the dogmatists and against those who find nothing of worth in curiosity and rigor, or in experimentation, skepticism, and discovery.

I can only respond to those opposed to discovery with questions and fiction—as we do not inhabit the same world, argument is stillborn—but to the dogmatists and, it must be said, to those who favor curiosity and thus oppose science because they believe science poisons curiosity, I can offer history and reason and ruin.

To offer the whole of that argument is to offer a book; instead, here is the abstract:

We humans have sought to know, and in seeking, have sought to make sense of what we have found. How we make sense has varied—through recourse to myths, common sense, measurement, extrapolation, generalization, systematization, reflection, etc.—and what we make of the sense we make has varied as well. Sometimes we call it truth or religion or wickedness or allegory or interpretation; sometimes we call it science. Sometimes this science is the means, sometimes it is the end, sometimes it is both. In early modern times [in Europe], in the period now known as the Scientific Revolution, science was thought to reveal truths about God, as it also was by those scientists working under the Abbasids; that it also brought technological advance and political and economic gain helped to preserve it against those who argued that a thirst for knowledge was itself corrosive of the faith.

Yet even throughout much of the modern period science was understood as, if no longer an appendage of natural philosophy, as nonetheless a part of a constellation of knowledge which included the arts, literature, and humanities; its practitioners are all a part of the learned class.

This collegiality faded, and now science is understood primarily as comprising the natural sciences and its methods; to the extent some social sciences adopt those methods, they may or may not be admitted to the realm as sciences, albeit as its lesser, ‘softer’, version. That science has a history is barely acknowledged, and it is unclear if scientists (or their learned critics) would consider them as ‘intellectuals’ rather than (mere) technicians, experimentalists, and lab directors.

This separation (and, often, contempt) is lamentable all around. [Natural] science is more than its tools and methods, involves more [hermeneutic] interpretation than the experimentalists may admit of, and requires greater curiosity than its skeptics may allow. But if we want to know, if we humans truly seek a human science (and, again, I would argue there is no other), then we have to prevent science from sliding all the way into scientism. Some think it’s already so technics-shriveled, that it is already mere methodological fetishism; I disagree.

This saving gesture doesn’t require that artists now refer to themselves as scientists or that neurobiologists become novelists. No, this reclamation project (another ruin) would gather the curious back together, to see if we exiles from one another would have anything to say to one another, to see what we could see.

I don’t believe this every day—yesterday, for example, I had no patience for this.

But some days, some days I think we humans could do this. Some days, this is my something more.


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Too goddamned irritated to blog

13 12 2010

You call your ‘movement’ No Labels, give yourself the motto Not Left. Not Right. Forward., and yet on the top of your web page insist

We are Democrats, Republicans, and Independents who are united in the belief that we do not have to give up our labels, merely put them aside to do what’s best for America.

Kentucky fucking chicken, what’s the point of calling yourself No Label if what you really mean is Every Label (on the inside pocket)?

And it’s a stupid idea, anyway.

And then this, from a blog which insistence and crankiness I like and respect: Removing science from anthropology.

What anthropologists do is up to them; that said, I generally think we social scientists should hang on to the word ‘science’ with all our grubby little might. ‘Science’ in its most general terms as a search for knowledge has a long and honorable history and, as I always like to point out, one of the earliest known seekers was Aristotle—who considered political science the highest of all sciences. So there.

What chaps me about this piece is not that non-anthropologists have opinions about this move, but after the requisite words of respect about the so-called softer sciences, Orac also has to toss in the requisite bullshit references to ‘post-modernism’ and ‘political correctness’.

Yeah, I get it, he sees invidious parallels between claims about ‘other ways of knowing’ and his white whale, complementary and alternative medicine.

This is an intriguing claim. Truly.

But again with the KFC: Do you need to haul out straw-ass versions of an interpretive method which definition you draw from Sokal  in order to light the whole goddamned discussion on fire?

Kentucky Jesus Fried Christ.


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Are spirits in the material world

8 08 2010

I don’t believe in life after death.

There is life, here, in this world, and death both is and signals the end of life.

Now, is there something else, after life? That, I don’t know.

If there is something else, it doesn’t seem that it would conform to notions of Christian or Muslim heaven; those seem so earth-bound, so reflective of what we already have here, only someone’s version of better.  (A multitude of virgins or streets paved with gold? Really?) If there would be something else, wouldn’t it be. . . something else?

Backing up: I think of life as bounded by this earth, but I’m fudging on the whole existence thing, that is, we exist in life, here, and if our existence continues, then it would be in some other way.

Furthermore, that there could be something else doesn’t mean it’s supernatural. I don’t believe in the supernatural; I think everything—everything—is natural, and that that which is called ‘supernatural’ is simply something for which we lack understanding.

(And woo? Woo is a cover, a con: obfuscation masquerading as understanding.)

This isn’t rank materialism. I also don’t believe the (natural or social) sciences are sufficient to make sense of all worldly—universal—phenomenon; I’m not arguing that understanding necessitates a reduction of all things to the latest brand of physics. It’s simply that, if there is nothing beyond nature, then we’ll need new ways of understanding—new sciences—to make sense of that which current scientific methods cannot.

Does this tend toward a Theory of Everything? Perhaps, but since TOE is conceptualized in contemporary terms, it may be inadequate to describe all that there is.

And ‘is’ itself may be—hell, already is—called into question, along with ‘all’ and ‘that’.

*Sigh* It’s late and I”m not making sense.

I’m wondering about death because a little over a week ago Bean died and a little over a year ago Chelsea died.  I don’t think they’re in pet heaven or regular heaven or whatever. I don’t know if they’ve gone some place after death, if their existence continues, or what relationship that existence has to any worldly one. Maybe there’s nothing, maybe there’s something. I know they’re not with me.

But I would like to think, that if there is something, that they neither forget nor are constrained by life. This existence on earth, this life, is powerful, and if there is something else, I’d like to think it offers us more without taking away what we already were. Perhaps there is no full understanding on this earth, no way for us to comprehend all there is; perhaps life is to get us started, but it’s not enough, not enough for us to know.

I don’t know this, of course. And maybe this is it, and this life which is not enough is it. Perhaps this life is enough.

My methods are insufficient to determine one way or the other.


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Friday poem (Monday): An Anatomy of the World

29 03 2010

Tuesday update: Sorry for posting a naked poem—Wordpress was all wonky last night.

Anyway.

I have, of late, become preoccupied with the medieval period in Europe history, or, more accurately, with the intellectual history of that long moment of transition between medieval times and modernity.

The ‘whys’ of a such a preoccupation I’ll save for another post. But given my current backward glance, a poem from that moment seemed appropriate.

John Donne is not, strictly speaking, a medieval poet: He was writing at the turn of and into the 17th century, a time which might be pegged as ‘early modern.’ But he fits into that long moment of transition during which old certainties about the place of God in nature were crumbling under the onslaught of observation and a kind of deistic theorizing. 

Three centuries later Yeats noted that ‘the center cannot hold/Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world’, but the intellectual revolutions of  the 17th century were in many ways far more unsettling than the political revolutions of the  20th: How was man to know who he was if his God were pushed into the recesses of the heavens, and mere mechanism replaced divinity and grace?

The section, below, from Donne’s elegy for a friend’s young daughter allows us entry into that disorienting new world—the world we now take for granted as our own. Reason and science and deduction will lead us forward, it was argued then (and now)—nevermind the past.

In mourning this young girl, however, Donne shows that a world without a past is a world without meaning; to take things apart may yield a new kind of knowledge, but it may also leave us dismantled.

from An Anatomy of the World

And new philosophy calls all in doubt,
The element of fire is quite put out;
The sun is lost, and the earth, and no-man’s wit
Can well direct him where to look for it.
And freely men confess that this world’s spent,
When in the planets and the firmament
They seek so many new; they see that this
Is crumbled out again to his atomies.
‘Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone;
All just supply, and all relation:
Prince, subject, father, son, are things forgot,
For every man alone thinks he hath got
To be a phoenix, and that there can be
None of that kind, of which he is, but he.
This is the world’s condition now, . . .


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