The year ahead…

We keep being asked when the pandemic will end. It will never end, scientifically speaking. The novel coronavirus causing the COVID-19 pandemic will not be so novel anymore, and it will join the other four (or so) human coronaviruses circulating in the human population. It will cause nuisance infections for most of us. For a few of us going forward, it will cause what feels at worst like a flu and at best what feels like a bad cold. It will not kill us, especially if we’re otherwise healthy and have some sort of immunity. Sadly, people the world over will continue to die from it, especially in those places in the world where only the filthy rich (by comparative standards) or the people in power are able to have healthcare of any kind.

An old boss of mine told me that the best lesson he could give his kids — and he was now giving to me — was that life was not fair. He said I would need to know this to be a functional adult in society. I was 35 years old at the time.

Why is it that “wisdom” like that is acceptable? Why is it that we’re okay with the world not being fair? “Oh, sorry, but life is unfair and that’s why you get to die from a vaccine-preventable disease, kiddo.” Or, “Life is not fair, so your tooth abscess that could be treated with simple antibiotics will kill you.”

No. It’s more like, “Your parents were idiots and thought they knew more about infectious disease prevention than your pediatrician, kiddo.” And, “The rich white guys at the state capitol decided not to expand Medicaid to cover your abscessed tooth because their kids have health insurance and you’re Black.” That’s where the real unfairness in life is, in people being absolute jerks. They got theirs, and nothing else needs to be done about anything. You’re freezing because the power grid failed? Sorry, they have a thing in Cancun that needs to be taken care of. They want pandemic restrictions lifted? Yeah, go ahead and lift them, but keep the one that keeps the Brown people out of the country… That public health intervention is the one we need.

So, yeah, politicians will continue to be jerks into 2023, and we’ll have to smile and nod at them when we go meet them to talk about our work lest we piss them off and our bosses feel “embarrassed.” I swear, half of the work we do is because of ill-informed decisions of policymakers who think they know more than they really do. The other half is because people don’t know what to do with everything that is bombarding them daily. And the bombardment is constant.

Just the other night, an NFL player dropped dead in the middle of a game and was revived on the field by first responders and team doctor. Without missing a beat, the trolls and automated bots immediately descended on social media and started saying/writing that the player “died suddenly.” Instead of going with the most probable thing (being hit hard in the chest at a high velocity and with a lot of mass), they go with the most conspiratorial… Because that’s how their minds work. That’s what they do. And the ones who know better do it just to sow discord and get us all riled up. (Nothing would benefit certain foreign powers than a United States where vaccine-preventable diseases made a comeback. How’s that for a conspiracy theory?)

The year ahead is going to be nuts. It’s going to be better than the last three years of the pandemic. I mean, it has to be. But it’s also going to be a year with its own challenges. Florida has an anti vaxxer at the helm of their public health agency. Their governor is getting ready to run for President, and there is nothing he won’t do or say to win. Extremist governments on the Right and the Left are coming to power in different countries and localities. Ebola is still bubbling in Africa. Climate change is bringing tropical diseases to the geographic north.

What a time to be alive.

Won’t you join us?

2019’s Douchebag of the Year: Robert F. Kennedy, Jr

It was a close one, but 2019’s Douchebag of the Year (by two votes) is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. The “activist” has been going bonkers over vaccines for a while now. First, it was the mercury in vaccines, but then Andrew Jeremy Wakefield was like, “No, my dude. The MMR doesn’t mercury in it, and it causes mad autism.” (Read that in a posh British accent.) So RFK, Jr. changed his tune. It’s all about the vaccines now, not mercury.

The Stuff of Nightmares

He is so devoted to the idea that vaccines are evil that he went to Samoa to talk about them along with Douchebag Runner-Up Taylor Winterstein. The result? Thousands of children sick with measles, hundreds hospitalized and dozens dead. Yeah, yeah, you could argue that it was not a direct result of his visit, just like Andrew Jeremy’s visit to Somali residents of Minnesota right before they had their big measles outbreak there is pure coincidence.

But, hey, if people like Bob-o here and Andy there are going to see causation when there is only correlation, then so am I. And, for that, they have blood on their hands.

Jesus Christ, he’s spooky.

As winner of this distinguished prize, we will be donating $100 to UNICEF for vaccines in the name of this crazy f*ck.

Make it stop!!!

“Vaxxed II: Son of Vaxxed” in One Minute

In case you missed it, the merry gang of anti-vaccine warriors have produced yet another piece of filthy anti-vaccine propaganda. As creative as they are, they named it “Vaxxed II.” That’s it. No subtitle. At least all of the Avengers films have subtitles like Age of Ultron or Infinity War. So I’m calling this one, Son of Vaxxed.

Sticking to that lack of creativity, the film is just a mishmash of anti-vaccine testimonials and mishandling of facts. People are put in front of cameras, they talk about what happened after a vaccine, and the production team slickly edits their testimony to fit into the anti-vaccine narrative. As I’ve told you, everything and anything that happens to people happens after vaccination, and this film doesn’t disappoint in delivering that narrative. It doesn’t matter when on how something happened, if it happened after a vaccine, then nothing else but the vaccine caused it.

Never mind we have all of the scientific evidence that these things just happen, and that them happening after vaccination is coincidence. People who are against vaccines in the way that the Andrew Jeremy Wakefields of the world are against vaccines — and pro-revenue and fame — don’t want to hear rational explanations for observed phenomena. You had a blood clot months after getting vaccinated? It wasn’t your overweight, smoking and birth control pills. It was the vaccine you had months ago. Your car crashed and you died in the accident? It wasn’t that you were t-boned by a dump truck. It was the vaccine you took at the doctor’s office that day. And you are one of millions of women who got the HPV vaccine and then developed cervical cancer? It’s not that you are in the risk pool for that particular cancer and had a history of low-grade lesions. No… It was the vaccine.

That’s what Son of Vaxxed is all about, spurious associations between two things — one being vaccines and the other being something bad — and nothing else. It’s all conjecture, conspiracy and correlation explained as causation. It’s the government coming to get you and millions of physicians, nurses and epidemiologists all being controlled (if they’re not coordinated amongst themselves) by a big, international conglomerate of pharmaceutical companies who behave not at all like multinational companies do and compete with each other. No, they are all in it together, because that’s how you make profits: not by unmasking the harm your competitor’s product causes and offering your own alternative, but by writing the evidence of your evil misdeeds in the package inserts sent out with each box of a vaccine.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the “Vaxxed Bus” collapses on itself into a neutron star… The people riding it are really that dense, and we are stupider for watching their sequel.

I’d Like to Play a Game

…But I can’t. I can’t play a game with anti-vaccine people because Game Theory assumes that you’re dealing with rational players. When it comes to the people who peddle in anti-vaccine conspiracy theories, you’re not dealing with rational people. You’re dealing, for the most part, with some incredibly irrational individuals who believe any and all conspiracy theories put forth to them by the people they worship.

They’re kind of like a cult, or a loose federation of cults. They have one or two (or three) high priests in the forms of Andrew Jeremy Wakefield, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. or Del Bigtree. Those three men could sacrifice a virgin at an altar streaming live on social media, and it’s a safe bet that their anti-vaccine followers would find a way to justify the ritual. “It had to be done to stop the vaccine holocaust,” they would probably say. And the people would swallow it up hook, line and sinker.

Look at how they see vaccine package inserts. Package inserts are legal documents required by regulatory agencies to accompany medications. When it comes to vaccines, the package inserts name the ingredients in the vaccines, how the vaccine works, when it should be administered, to whom it should be administered and what kinds of side-effects (if any) were seen during the clinical trials of the vaccination.

Mind you, anti-vaccine people claim that there have been no clinical trials of any of these vaccines. Then, when you point out that it’s in the package inserts — the very same goddamned inserts they want you to read because they contain the truth — they flip it around and say that the package inserts are full of lies. If your head is spinning, wait for it. There’s more.

A few weeks ago, some dude who is a hardcore anti-vaccine advocate/activist/loon physically assaulted a California State Senator. The dude has a following on social media, and he ran unsuccessfully for the senator’s seat. Anti-vaccine luminaries followed the dude and praised him. Ah, but the minute the dude gets violent, they all turned on him and started the conspiracy theory that the dude was in cahoots with the senator in order to make anti-vaccine people look violent and nutty.

Then, just last week, some woman woke up in the morning, went to the state capitol in Sacramento, sat in the gallery of the senate, reached down into her vagina, pulled out a menstrual cup that had blood in it and threw the damned thing on to the senate floor, striking several of the legislators. As she was detained by police, she stood there and screamed to whomever could listen that she did it for the dead babies that vaccines caused.

Well, that is what happened in reality. In nutty-land, she was not an anti-vaccine activist and no one had ever heard of her. She wasn’t there to protest vaccines, either. She was there to protest abortion. And what she threw at the senators was not blood, it was paint, a cup of fruit or nothing at all, depending on which anti-vaccine lunatic you’re listening to.

Of course, there is the grand delusion that anything bad that happens to a person after getting a vaccine is the direct result of the vaccine. Car accident? The vaccine did it. Blood clot when you’re morbidly obese, a smoker and on birth control, months after a vaccine? The vaccine did it. Stroke when you’re in your 90s, have had high blood pressure all your life and are on anticoagulants? The vaccine did it. Suffocated to death under the weight of your high-as-fuck mother? The vaccine did it. Trump? The vaccine did it. Hillary Clinton? The vaccine did it.

Don’t even get me started on health care people who decided that they are going to be anti-vaccine. When you spend years of your life studying the sciences, and then you decide to deny the evidence and make some money off of lies… That’s psychopathic. That’s someone who cannot be trusted to be licensed to take care of a dog, let alone a human being. (With all due respect to veterinarians who do take care of dogs.) These so-called physicians and nurses who decide to peddle anti-vaccine nonsense should not be licensed to practice anything even remotely related to caring for the health of people.

And that’s why, as much as I want to play games with anti-vaccine people and get them all riled up in order to have them see the error of their ways, I cannot. They’re not rational. They don’t play by the rules of society, let alone reality. They live in either Crosby’s Labyrinth or something eerily similar to it. Up is down. Left is right. What you are seeing is not what your eyes are witnessing but some gummed up version of reality put in front of you by people who control the world and do not allow a shred of truth to get out except through their websites, blogs and social media channels… Channels to which you can subscribe and donate your money since they are not being paid millions. (Not by pharma, anyway.)

So I’ll have to look to another theory that is not Game Theory in order to better understand these nuts and continue to fight them. Because you should not have a shred of doubt that I will fight them until I cannot fight them anymore. And, even then, even when I cannot fight them anymore, someone else will. We’ve been doing it since Jenner, and we’ll do it beyond the age of Offit.

Your move, mother Hubbards. Your move.

Won’t Someone Think of the Antivaxxers?

Is it bad that I turn on the news on the radio on the way to work hoping and praying that the President of the United States hasn’t done something to collectively embarrass us as a nation? Now, is it bad that I keep doing it knowing full well that it’s not going to happen? You know what they say about what the definition of insanity is…

Speaking of the insane, it seems that antivaxxers have taken their charade about being persecuted one step too far. Well, too far if you’re a reasonable person. They seem to think that nothing is “too far” when it comes to defending their skewed view of the world and attacking those they despise for trying to save lives of children. This time, they decided to compare themselves to Jews and other minorities who were systematically hunted down and killed during the Holocaust.

As Helene Sinnreich, PhD, put it in the Washington Post:

“It is not the first time the anti-vaccination movement has appropriated the Holocaust. Anti-vaccination advocates have called the side effects of vaccinations a modern-day Holocaust. They compare the criticism directed toward parents who choose not to vaccinate their children to the persecution of Jews during the Holocaust and label those who advocate for stringent laws around vaccines as Nazis. But this misuse of history distorts and undermines the actual horrors of the Holocaust. It also ignores that so many Holocaust victims died of infectious diseases — the same ones that vaccines could prevent today.”

Indeed. They keep playing the “I’m being persecuted” card all the time. They call themselves victims when they are not. They claim they are “toxic” or “diseased” from having “too many” vaccinations. And, of course, anything and everything is to be blamed on vaccines.

Dr. Sinnreich continued:

“The death toll from infectious disease was so high because Jews were stripped of basic resources including medical equipment, medicine and food. They were even denied quality soap. Doctors and other care providers helped fight disease in terrible conditions with scant supplies, many succumbing to disease themselves. Starving people traded food for medicine to help family members survive.

Vaccines emerged as a powerful, if expensive, tool for resistance. Smugglers found ways to bring medicine and even nascent vaccines into the ghetto. Those few who could obtain a vial of vaccine on the black market paid more than 100 times their weight in gold to obtain them. The going rate for a vaccine in the Warsaw ghetto could buy 30,000 bowls of soup — an astronomical amount in a place where people perished of hunger in the streets.”

So, yeah… Privileged (predominantly) white people in the United States, all very much free to do as they wish, are comparing themselves to the Holocaust victims who were forcibly removed from their homes and put into ghettos without basic supplies needed to be alive. They are comparing themselves to people who would pay with their lives for having the protection that vaccines provided. Antivaxxers are so persecuted.

Won’t someone think of the antivaxxers?

Look at this image:

Dead bodies being pulled from a train carrying Romanian Jews toward prison and death camps. (Source)

Ignorant anti-vaccine activists want you to believe that they are being treated in the same way. They want you to believe that a requirement to vaccinate so that we’re all safe — especially those too young or too sick to be vaccinated — is the same thing as between 12 and 17 million people experienced during the Holocaust. Nothing could be further from the truth, but antivaxxers are not exactly known for their firm grasp of the truth.

Or this image:

Bodies of dead children from the Warsaw ghetto. (Source)

Antivaxxers will have you believe that they are suffering a holocaust of their own from all the “injuries” from vaccines. But where are the bodies? Are children who are immunized being hauled away like waste in carts? Where are the mass graves?

What anti-vaccine people are going through with quarantines and exclusions from schools IS NOTHING AT ALL LIKE WHAT JEWS WENT THROUGH IN THE HOLOCAUST. No, they are not being persecuted. There’s no police force searching for them and dragging them away to jail (or worse). There is no law preventing them from getting married or having children.

How much more clearer can we make it?!

This Guy Lies About Vaccines Without Even Blinking

Maybe he doesn’t blink because it’s a picture, but still..

Dr. Steven Lantier, an anesthesiologist, has penned an opinion piece for The Oklahoman, and, man, does it have some woozies in there.

You can read the whole thing here, but let me just show you one paragraph that should be enough to make you scratch your head…

“There is actually not much science behind “herd immunity.” The vaccine rates in the United States for Hepatitis A (9 percent), Hepatitis B (24.5 percent), pneumococcal (20.4 percent) and influenza (43.2 percent) are many times below their threshold, yet we haven’t had outbreaks of these diseases for decades now. Actually, vaccines often have the opposite effect. Not only can they — and often do — make people sick, it is well documented that vaccinated persons have passed on to others the same virus they were being protected from.”

Jesus Christ, where to begin?

“…(Y)et we haven’t had outbreaks of these diseases for decades now.” Oh, really? When it comes to Hepatitis A: We have had three in the last two years, according to CDC. When it comes to Hepatitis B: There are many, according to CDC. And those are just in healthcare. 

And, influenza… WE HAVE YEARLY EPIDEMICS. Hence, “THE GODDAMNED FLU SEASON.”

Who gave this guy his medical degree? What kind of Mickey Mouse institution taught him medicine?

I’m too mad to write anything else. That up there should be enough. Go to hell, Dr. Lantier, and say hello to Art Briles while you’re down there.

The Anti-Vaccine Zealot’s Endgame

I’ve met a lot of anti-vaccine people in my life and in my lines of work. Like any other group of people, anti-vaccine people span a wide range of personalities, behaviors and other traits. They are far from being a monolith, but they do share a lot of common characteristics. Some characteristics are good, like caring about their children or working hard in their professions. Other characteristics just plain scare and confuse me.

Yeah, they may care about their children, but they’re willing to lie and bully other people and, thus, set a bad example for their children on how civil discourse should be carried out on topics that are of importance to everyone. Others go as far as to compare their children to animals or say that their children are “lost” or “dead” while the child is right there next to them. They confuse autism or any other developmental delay or intellectual disability with being completely not there. That is, the child hears and in many cases understand their statements.

I can only imagine being that young and wondering why your own parent is calling you a mistake, a dead person, or an animal of some sort (outside of terms of endearment, like “my little bear,” of course).

Then there is the outright hatred the anti-vaccine zealots direct at people they see as their enemies. There’s the death threats and the threats of violence to the loved ones of people who work in public health, medicine, science or something even remotely related to vaccines. They’ll show up in groups to talks by vaccine scientists and spew all sorts of angry rhetoric, sometimes with a lot of spittle, sometimes with hoarse throats from all their yelling.

But what, exactly, is their endgame? In chess, we know that we need to capture the King, getting through all the other pieces while anticipating your opponent’s every move. In football, you get the ball from one end to the other, yards at a time. In baseball, you have to put the ball in play and run around the bases, all within the limits of the 9 innings of play.

That is, there are rules of engagement for those activities and sports. Heck, one could argue that even war has some sort of an endpoint, despite the recent examples of the war on terror. So what are anti-vaccine people aiming for? When will they be happy enough that they stop being so goddamned evil?

Ever since Jenner came up with the first vaccine back in the late 1700s, anti-vaccine organizations and people have lost their collective minds at the prospect of immunization. They created “leagues” and “brigades” to organize themselves against laws and other requirements for vaccination. They said that the smallpox vaccine — made from the cowpox virus — would turn you into a cow, or any other sort of animal.

They lied as much back then as they do today, except that today they have the weapons of mass media and social media to spread those lies farther and faster than ever before. They organize through electronic means and summon up dozens of their like-minded trolls to go to presentations by vaccine scientists and spread even more lies and misinformation. Or they create anonymous or pseudonymous blogs to seed fear and distrust of science in their followers.

And for what?

Do they really think that vaccines will be outlawed or not used anymore? Even if, somehow, vaccine laws are reversed and children are not required to be vaccinated, the parents of those children will still listen to the advice of their physicians and get their children vaccinated. And, if they don’t and vaccine-preventable diseases make a big comeback, the ensuing wave of disease and death would certainly make people think twice about their decision to forgo vaccination.

That’s actually happening right now in Italy after the populist and somewhat anti-vaccine government saw that measles is out of control.

This is why I and others wonder if anti-vaccine people know that they will be dead and long forgotten and vaccines will still be a thing. After all, no one remembers the leader of the first anti-vaccine group, but we all remember Jenner. So is it worth it to be so goddamned angry about vaccines all the time? Is it worth it to be so anti-science and to endanger so many lives by scaring parents away from vaccinating their children?

Apparently, to far too many people it is worth it, and they will continue to do their worst… Which suits me just fine. It’s job security for me. It makes me stronger. It gives me purpose. But it all would be just a little bit easier if they had a clear mission statement, something they’re working toward and something we scientists could focus on preventing.

Instead, we get idiotic showmen making idiotic documentaries with idiotic talking heads who think they know better. We get fluff. We get marshmallow. We never get raw meat to sick our teeth into, so to speak.

Photo by Robert Whitehead on Visualhunt.com / CC BY

Anti-Vaccine People Are Nuts, and Here’s Proof

ZDogg, MD, (real name “Zubin Damania“) an online celebrity and physician who talks about healthcare issues, recently interviewed Dr. Paul Offit, a pediatrician and vaccine developer. You can hear in the video below how nuts anti-vaccine zealots are. They pounded and pounded and screamed from behind a window to try and interrupt the interview. They really hate Dr. Offit that much, and they’re really crazy enough to think that pounding on windows and screaming like they did is something that is acceptable.

The video is 1 hour and 10 minutes long. The pounding on the windows starts at around 3 minutes 25 seconds in and goes on for a long time while ZDogg and Dr. Offit just ignore them…

 

Our Military Families Deserve Better Than Dr. Bob Sears

You remember Dr. Bob Sears? He is one of our Douchebags of the Year, and, hence, one of our Douchebags Emerit-Ass. He’s been put on probation by the California Medical Board for, according to the LA Times:

“Sears found himself in hot water because, according to the medical board, he wrote a vaccine exemption for a young boy without obtaining even basic medical information, such as the child’s history of vaccines. He took the boy’s mother at her word when she said her son lost urinary function and went limp in response to previous immunizations, according to the filing.”

Remember that this is the same Dr. Bob Sears who denied ever talking to a writer about a measles outbreak being started by one of his patients, when there were recordings of the conversation as part of Seth Mnookin writing a book. The same Dr. Bob Sears who admitted to just making up his “alternative vaccine schedule” without any science. I mean, seriously, why haven’t we re-nominated him to be Douchebag of the Year again?

As it turns out, Tricare, the health insurance that handles healthcare payments for military members and their families (if they go outside the VA system), doesn’t like physicians who run afoul of the standard of care. And we don’t blame them. Would you spend money on someone who’s so seemingly anti-vaccine? (And that wasn’t the only thing Dr. Bob Sears did that got him in trouble.)

Of course you wouldn’t.

We’re guessing that Dr. Bob Sears doesn’t have a personal mental health counselor because it seems that he takes to Facebook to work things out in his head, and get a lot of loving attention from his anti-vaccine followers. And that’s just what he did when Tricare decided to not pay for his care anymore.

Somebody call the whaaaaaaaambulance!

You know what? Good! Military families already sacrifice enough without this douchebag placing them at risk of vaccine-preventable infections just by having them in his waiting room. Physicians like Dr. Bob Sears who flaunt making up vaccine recommendations, give out unjustified vaccine exemptions, fail to properly assess the health status of a child after said child gets hit by a hammer, and acts like such a pompous douche do not deserve the privilege to serve as physicians to anyone, let alone children of military parents.

“With Love and Prayers”? People of real Faith don’t lie, Dr. Bob Sears.

Douchebags do.

Anti-vaccine people are going to kill us all: Exhibit #605,678

Check out this story from Houston:

“A nurse at Texas Children’s Hospital has been discharged after she posted information on social media about a boy who tested positive for measles, hospital officials said Tuesday afternoon.

…

The nurse posted about the child on an anti-vaccination group’s Facebook page called Proud Parents of Unvaccinated Children-Texas, according to screenshots of posts obtained by The Houston Chronicle.

It’s not clear whether the child was vaccinated for the measles virus. The boy had recently traveled overseas, Houston Health Department officials said in a Facebook post Monday night.

The nurse, who listed Texas Children’s as her workplace on Facebook, described her experience seeing a child with measles for the first time.

“I think it’s easy for us nonvaxxers to make assumptions but most of us have never and will never see one of these diseases,” she said. “By no means have I changed my vax stance, and I never will. But I just wanted to share my experience and how much worse it was than I expected.””

Imagine that! Measles is much worse than what she expected. Remember, these are the people who are convinced that autism is worse than death, that autistic children are like animals, and that they would rather have children suffer through these things than be vaccinated. The nurse even contemplated sharing this “much worse” disease with her child at home:

“The postings included some comments by other group members, and at one point, the nurse commented, “I’m not kidding that I thought about swabbing his mouth and bringing it home to my 13 (year old).””

That’s right. She thought about taking this deadly disease that put a child in ICU home to her son. I wonder if she thought about spreading it to other parts of the hospital?

Sure, she’s been fired, but where will she go next? What will she attempt to spread? Who will suffer the consequences of her science denialism while working in a very sensitive position when it comes to the public’s health?