via The Soap Box

The anti-vaccination movement is a large group of like minded people whom believe that vaccines cause autism (along with some other stuff, but mostly autism). While there are a lot of things I’ve noticed about this movement, I’ve managed to narrow it down to five.

So here are five things I’ve noticed about the anti-vaccination movement:

5. There’s no need for it to exist.

If you are part of the anti-vaccination movement, then you are in a movement that does not need to exist, and in fact shouldn’t exist.

Every claim made about vaccines being harmful and causing debilitating neurological conditions (most commonly autism) has been proven to be false, and vaccines have been proven to be not only the cheapest method of disease control and prevention, but also the best, and the safest.

Complications from vaccines are rare (around maybe 1 and 1000) and mostly minor. Serious complications are extremely rare (around 1 to 2 per million), and deaths are even rarer than that.

4. It’s biggest supporters are a bunch of cranks.

LINK: Junk Science and the Anti-Vaccine Fraud

The biggest supporters (and leaders) of the anti-vaccination are not only people who should not be giving out medical advice, most of them aren’t even doctors (and the ones that are tend to have some questionable credentials).

Jenny McCarthy, one of the top supporters, is not a doctor. In fact she left nursing school in order to become a model. She promotes therapies that are harmful, and she’s also a liar too…

Andrew Wakefield, the ex-doctor whom’s 1998 research paper that was published in the Lancet that claimed to show a connection between vaccines and autism, was stuck off of the British General Medical Council register (the British equivalent of having your medical license revoked) after the Lancet retracted his paper after it was proven his research was based off of fraud. He still claims his research was not fraudulent, and that there was a conspiracy against him to destroy his research (despite the fact that it took over ten years from the time his paper was published for his paper to be retracted, and for the GMC to strike off his name).

Then there is Alex Jones, who thinks that vaccines are being used to create genetically modified people and causes diseases, not prevent them.

3. The movement is based off of lies.

The whole bases for the anti-vaccine movement is based off of the proven fraudulent 1998 research paper by Andrew Wakefield that claims there is a connection between the MMR vaccines and austim. The paper was highly controversial even when it came out, and the claims made in it had been dis-proven years before it was formally retracted for fraud.

Other lies made by the movement are that vaccines have been made more dangerous over the years (in fact they have been made safer) and that and the rates of autism in children who are un-vaccinated is far lower then those that have been vaccinated, which is false. In fact the rates are the same.

MORE . . .

Also see: The final nail in the coffin for the antivaccine rallying cry “Too many too soon”?

Here is an infographic that shows the rate of incidence of a disease appearing with and without a vaccine. Here is the source of the data.

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