Rest in peace, Dan Olmsted

Dan Olmsted, one of the editors of Age of Autism (the blog full of lies and misrepresentations, and a near-psychotic obsession with trying to link vaccines and conspiracies to anything that happens in the world) has passed away. There must always be honor in the battlefield of ideas, especially from those of us who fight with facts and evidence in our arsenal. So, please, do not celebrate his death. Be respectful of the people who love him and will be heartbroken at his passing.

Rest in peace, Dan Olmsted.

Grasping at straws to blame vaccines for an infant’s death

I will never, ever be happy that a child dies. You will never hear me say that they are in a “better place” or that there is some grander plan behind said death. And I can only imagine how tough it must be for a parent to lose a child.

What really grinds my gears is when a parent who loses a child goes to great lengths to blame vaccines. It’s one thing to grieve and want to blame something, but it’s another to waste money and resources in order to blame vaccines. This is the story of such a story:

“Rachel French did what most parents do: she took her baby to the doctor to get vaccinated. She was unaware of the associated risks that come along with these drugs and learned the hard way. She lost her adorable son less than three days after he was given eight routine vaccines.”

Of course, anything that happens after vaccination is directly a result of the vaccination, no matter what. At least that’s how anti-vaccine nuts operate in Crosby’s Labyrinth. The story gets really weird further down, but look at this part first:

“Her son’s autopsy report stated he died from asphyxiation from an undetermined cause. There was nothing obstructing his airways, nor did he have any physical signs of trauma at the time of his death.

The medical examiner and detective handling the case did not provide a good enough explanation for Rachel to understand what had happened to her baby. This led Rachel on her own journey to find out the truth. Rachel was told by the doctors that the vaccines had nothing to do with what had happened.

Years later, her lost son came through to her in a dream and eventually helped her uncover the truth. Her own investigation involving a child death investigator and pathologists proved the vaccines were responsible. This is their family’s harrowing story.”

Again, losing a child is horrible, so I’m sure that “Rachel” wanted some evidence that something else, like vaccines, killed her child. It’s not that she was anti-vaccine, per se. After all, the child was vaccinated. But everything just goes flying off the rails after that dream she had:

“It wasn’t until more than a few years after Danny passed, that I had a weird dream of my son. He came to me in my dream and it is the only dream I know of him being in.

He was just sitting in his bouncy seat and a man’s voice said, “It was the ‘site-o-kin’ storm that killed me.”

I decided to Google the term and found the term cytokine storm.”

And this is where I call bullshit. Our dreams are these very impressive constructs of fantasy and reality created by our brains in order to help us file away memories in a proper manner. Dream help us sort things out that are in our heads bothering us. Without dreams, we’d go crazy in a most literal sense. This statement by Rachel tells us all we need to know. She had more than likely looked up “cytokine storm” in relation to her son’s death, or she read about the cytokine storm somewhere and associated it with her son’s death. In either case, the dream tells us that her brain was in the process of filing the information away. However, because the death of her child was so meaningful, her brain instead associated the two things, leading her to hire “experts” who must have taken her for a chump:

“Danny had blood samples taken when he was twelve months old. On the day of Danny’s well-baby visit two months later, just before he passed, the day he was given that last set of shots, they had to take his blood again because of a previous lab mix-up.

I wasn’t comfortable with the way things were going so I had requested that the samples be sent to a facility for storing.

I had kept a locket of Danny’s hair after he had passed away, some slides requested after his autopsy, and decided to send some teeth and bone fragments from his ashes to the pathologist, along with the stored blood samples I had requested be saved. I then made arrangements to have the evidence reviewed.

Everything was reviewed by three separate pathologists. All three confirmed the same findings. The pathologists stated vaccine-induced hypercytokinemia as the cause of my son’s asphyxiation.”

First, routine blood samples are kept for no more than a week after they are collected. So we’re expected to believe that they were kept for years after his death. Next, based on this likely inexistent blood, some slides, and some bone fragments, these “experts” came up with “vaccine-induced hypercytokinemia”?

I’ll give you one guess and one guess only as to who uses that term? Yep, anti-vaccine nuts.

What’s more puzzling? This:

“They were able to determine this in large part to the blood panel taken prior to Danny receiving his vaccines, in contrast with the samples I had stored.”

So the blood that was mixed up at the lab at twelve months, and the blood that was likely not available after, all helped in determining this? I repeat, Rachel states that blood was drawn at twelve months but re-drawn because of a mix-up. The re-draw she states was stored in a facility, which explains the availability of the blood. But how did she find the mixed-up blood drawn at twelve months?

The whole thing has more questions than answers.

According to Google, the child died on July 4, 2008. There was one record that matches his in VAERS (ID 573366-1). I don’t know if it is his or not, but it bares many similarities to the story on the above mentioned anti-vaccine blog. There is no information on the investigation, and there likely won’t be. VAERS doesn’t work like that.

So how did Rachel even start wondering if vaccines caused her child’s death? A friend lost a child, too:

“A friend I had met before learning the truth about what happened to Danny went through something similar with her baby. The coroner called her and said her baby’s death was a SIDS case related to the DTaP vaccine he received at two months of age.

She called the next day, got a new medical examiner who said the other medical examiner was gone, she waited eight months for the autopsy report that was filled out by a different person and it stated accidental suffocation or something along those lines.”

Once that little seed of doubt got planted, it was only a matter of time until Rachel went looking for an answer, like a hammer looking for a nail.

The rest of the blog post is the usual dreck of anti-vaccine nuttery. In their pea brains, there is a cover-up and SIDS deaths are deaths from vaccines, accidental asphyxiations are deaths from vaccines, package inserts are confessions from pharmaceuticals about the evils of vaccines, and so on and so forth. You know the drill.

All in all, I really feel bad for Rachel. Here is a mother who lost her child and apparently wanted answers. When the answers were not enough, and when someone planted the idea that it was the vaccines, it seems that Rachel went looking for definitive proof of vaccines doing something to her child. And it seems that “experts” with some sort of anti-vaccine agenda took her for a ride and sold her the idea of “vaccine-induced cytokine storm.”

We do wonder who these “pathologists” are that confirmed this diagnosis. Are they board-certified, and, if so, does the medical board of the state where they practice know of these shenanigans?

Another dead autistic child killed by his mother

I’m writing this with tears in my eyes. My tears are from frustration and from a form of anger and, dare I say, hate that I feel toward certain people at this moment. I just read about yet another autistic child killed by his mother. This time, the mother (allegedly) threw the child off a bridge.

OFF A GODDAMNED BRIDGE.

Previous murders, and attempted murders, have been just as horrifying, but this one strikes me as particularly horrible because of the manner of death of the child. The child, who was a living, breathing human being with conciousness and self-awareness, who felt joy over seeing his parents reunited, was thrown off a bridge to his death in the river below. That takes planning. That takes time. His mother (allegedly) took him up to the bridge and then launched him to his death.

What was the child thinking? When he was dropping to the river, what were his thoughts?

I find myself begging and pleading to any higher authority in this universe that the child had no idea what was going on, and that his death was immediate upon hitting the water. That is the only kind of “fairness” I’d ask of God or a god.

My frustration grows even more when I realize that the Autism “false prophets” will likely use this tragic crime to bring attention to themselves and their pet projects and not to the thousands of autistic (and other special needs) children who need us to not waste money and time on chasing false causes of autism and funding false cures. Can you imagine if the money spent to buy congresspeople was donated to the family in question? That child would have likely not been killed like that.

My sadness only multiplies when I see so many parents blindly following Andrew Jeremy Wakefield and BS Hooker into the abyss.

Autism is not death, unless you want it to be

The latest scandal to rock the anti-vaccine crowd has done nothing to sway the opinions of the True Believers® about vaccines and autism. If anything, they think that they have a smoking gun and all the evidence in the world to point their fingers at vaccines as the causative agent of autism. At best (for them), they have evidence that giving the MMR vaccine before 36 months increases the risk of autism for African American boys. That is a big assumption because the DeStefano paper that has been so widely criticized as of late dealt with a case-control study and odds ratios. Thinking that you can reanalyze it as a cohort study with relative risks is poor judgment and horrible reasoning.

I’m not here to talk about all that. Others are doing a fine job in peeling the layers of the ineptitude of Andrew Jeremy Wakefield and BS Hooker in trying to scam the American public about vaccines and autism again:

• Orac tells us here, here, here and here about the whole goddamned thing. In fact, his latest post wraps it all up very neatly with a message to the “CDC whistleblower” and how the whistleblower’s scientific career is pretty much done.
• Todd W. tells us here about Andrew Jeremy Wakefield confusion about history, here about anti-vaccine activists on Twitter not understanding Twitter, and here about the whistleblower telling us all about being betrayed by Andrew Jeremy Wakefield and BS Hooker.
• Phil Plait tells us how, no, there is no connection between the MMR vaccine and autism, yet again, here.
• Liz Ditz tells us about the whistleblower statement here, about Andrew Jeremy Wakefield and BS Hooker implicating an African American researcher in an alleged scheme against African Americans here, and she gives us the overall backstory here.
• Finally, Ren tells us why the whistleblower’s and BS Hooker’s epidemiological and statistical reasoning is unsound here, and how everything came undone for Andrew Jeremy Wakefield and BS Hooker yesterday here.

That right there should be essential reading for you to get caught up. Now, let me tell you about a special group of people…

There is a special group of people who are, for the most part, parents of autistic children (or children with other developmental delays). These people are special because, although their child is right there in front of them, they are under the impression that the child is dead. They refer to their “lost” child, or how their child was “taken” from them, all the while the child is breathing in front of them. In many cases, the child is not just breathing but trying to interact with them. I write “trying” because the amount of online activity these people have makes me wonder if they have any time for their living, breathing, interacting child in front of them.

I’ve told you before why I believe that these people need to walk away from their children, and I even got a rabid anti-vaccine and conspiracy theorist threatening to kill me if he ever saw me in person for it. (Some people react in the weirdest ways to being told the truth.) The joke is on him, though. Ideas are bulletproof.

With so many anti-vaccine activists “hooked” on the “BS” over the “whistleblower”, I started to notice something about how they were presenting themselves online. During their “twitter party,” many of them had a black ribbon as an avatar. Why? Because these “non-sheeple” were told to:

While the black ribbon can mean different things to different people, it’s main use is for grieving or remembering the fallen, the dead. The way that these people have used it is to try to bring attention to their cause by equating autism with a death or a loss.

I call on these parents who think hours-long “parties” on Twitter are the best way to advocate for their children to walk away from their children immediately. Those children deserve love, caring, understanding, and acceptance. Why not go fight for them at school meetings to get them more inclusive curricula in public schools? Why not go to your elected representatives and demand laws to protect your children from scam non-medical treatments like bleach enemas and chemical castration? Why not write letters to the editors of your communities’ newspapers to advocate for acceptance in the community of your children with special needs so that they will not be shunned from your society and, instead, be integrated into it?

But to display black ribbons and say that your child is no more because he or she is autistic? How in any reasonable terms is that the best way for you to do something for your child? Again, walk away, because there are thousands more caring and loving people out there to take care of them than you, based on your brand of advocacy on line and in person.

On the death of Robin Williams and its consequences

I would be lying if I told you that the death of Robin Williams didn’t affect me. It did, and it did so very profoundly. Although I never knew Mr. Williams, I enjoyed his comedy very much. His quick wit and personality were something that I tried to emulate in my own life. I tried to be the funniest guy in the room, many times failing, but many times succeeding and making other people happy. A friend of mine told me that Mr. Williams likely committed suicide when he realised that his sadness inside could infect others, contrary to what he had set himself out to do in life. I agree.

Mr. Williams’ suicide is going to have a lot of consequences. Friends of mine in the mental health field have told me that a lot of people are reaching out to suicide prevention groups to do everything from talking to asking for help. His death has also brought mental health in general, and suicide in particular, to the forefront of our discussions as a nation. (If only we weren’t so preoccupied with things like Ebola in West Africa and wars all over the goddamned place.) If you look at the numbers, there are twice as many suicides as homicides in this country, which should be all the evidence we need to demand a revolution in how we treat people with mental health.

There are many evidence-based treatment for mental health problems, including a variety of medications and therapies. While the fields of psychiatry and psychology are sorely underfunded, plenty of information comes out year after year on what works and what doesn’t. Unfortunately, the great majority of the population doesn’t read journal articles. Instead, most people rely on what they hear or see on social media and experience in popular culture. As with the “vaccine wars,” it is sometimes dangerous what a celebrity (even a minor one) has to say about suicide and depression.

Staying with Mr. Williams’ case, a friend of his, comedian/actor Rob Schneider, took to Twitter to announce to the world that it was the medication that Mr. Williams was taking for his newly diagnosed Parkinson’s disease that triggered the successful suicide attempt. I don’t know if Mr. Schneider had confidential knowledge of the medications prescribed to Mr. Williams, but I do know that Mr. Schneider likes to dive into pseudo-science and make some “controversial” claims. For example, he has stated that vaccines cause all sorts of ailments:

“The doctors are not gonna tell you both sides of the issue… they’re told by the pharmaceutical industry, which makes billions of dollars, that it’s completely safe.”

“The efficacy of these shots have not been proven,” he later continued. “And the toxicity of these things — we’re having more and more side effects. We’re having more and more autism.”

Excuse me for being a little skeptical of Mr. Schneider’s assertion on what made Mr. Williams commit suicide. I can’t help myself, based on what he has said in the past. If he is making this assertion based only on the listed side effects of any medication used for Parkinson’s, then he is not helping anyone. He would not be helping people with moderate to severe depression or people with Parkinson’s.

The worst thing is that he would not be the only one whose statements can be “dangerous.” Plenty of other people of questionable mental health credentials came out shooting-off their mouths about what made Mr. Williams commit suicide, most if not all of it based on assumptions, most if not all of them wrong.

Please give up your children and walk away from them

The Canary Party, an anti-vaccine political action group, has hit a new low. On Saturday, First Lady Michelle Obama posted a picture of herself holding a sign that read “#BringBackOurGirls”. It was a reference to the 200+ young women in Nigeria who were kidnapped by an Islamist terrorist group and are now in danger of being sold off as slaves or suffer much worse fates. So what does the Canary Party do with that? This:

That’s right. In their twisted minds, autistic children are suffering the equivalent of being kidnapped at gun point, dragged into the jungle, physically and mentally tormented, and being sold off into slavery. And we wonder why parents of autistic children kill those children in the most heinous of ways? Why organizations and individuals in the anti-vaccine groups whitewash those murders and defend the alleged and confessed murderers of those kids?

I call on all the parents of autistic children who see their children as being in a state of despair beyond comprehension and beyond help to give up those children to child welfare, to foster parents, to relatives who do not see those children as “missing”, “lost”, “dead”, or “gone”. Give those children a chance to fill with joy and purpose the lives of better people than those of you who feed them chelation chemicals, bleach enemas, and all other sorts of quackery. Walk away from them because you’re not doing them any favors. You’re not making their lives better.

Do it quickly, because another autistic child murdered because of your ideology is one too many.

Nothing justifies the murder of a child. Period.

I’ve written to you before about the anti-vaccine, so-called autism advocates who have tried to justify/whitewash the murder of Alex Spourdalakis. In their minds, a parent who is unable to take care of their developmentally delayed (and, in the case of Alex, disabled) child are justified if they murder said child. Why? What would justify murder? Why, it’s the lack of funds to give that child care by quacks, liars and thieves. When Alex was found murdered in a most heinous manner, the so-called autism advocates (those who say there is an epidemic when there is none and seemingly blame nothing but vaccines) said, “Oh, poor mother, poor caretaker, they had no other choice.”

Really? They had no other choice? They had a choice to give the child up to child protective services among other choices that did not involve slowly poisoning, nearly severing his arm, and stabbing him repeatedly. In fact, it was well-documented that child protective services offered help, but Alex’s mother turned it down. No, she wanted quackery, and even Andrew Jeremy Wakefield was there to try and encourage people to donate money for said quackery. Andrew Jeremy Wakefield and his giant balls then asked whose fault it was that Alex was murdered. Well, I’m no forensic expert, but we have the confession of the mother and caretaker, their description of the crime, and the weapon… And, saddest of all, the motive.

Ideas have consequences

Tell any reasonable person out there that there are some ideas that should be controlled, and they will likely have some sort of an opposing reaction to your statement. Especially here in the West, we detest the idea of controlling who says what and where. There is the cliché of not yelling “fire!” in a crowded theater, of course. But, for pretty much other ideas and forms of speech, we very much like it when the government stays out of our way. I certainly would not like it if they shut down this blog.

But being free from government interference does not mean that you are free from the consequences of your thoughts and actions. For example, the idea that a child is “lost” or “dead” due to autism can and has had serious consequences. When a mother and a caretaker viciously murdered an autistic boy, they were defended by certain individuals to the point where the murder was whitewashed. They tried to reason that the mother and the caretaker had no choice but to, in a sense, put the boy out of his misery. Only that, it wasn’t the boy that was in misery, per se. It was the mother and caretaker. They couldn’t take the hand that they were dealt and they committed a most brutal act of savagery. Who knows if they thought their actions were justified because, hey, the autistic boy was already “good as dead”.

Today I read yet another story where someone was fed an idea and they acted on it:

“An Oregon mom has been accused of beating her 4-year-old son until his intestines ripped in two places — just because she thought he was gay.

Prosecutors say Jessica Dutro, 25, repeatedly subjected three of her children to traumatic beatings at the Washington County homeless shelter where they lived. But little Zachary Dutro-Boggess bore the brunt of his mom’s volatile temper, Oregon Live reports.“

She thought her 4 year-old was gay, so she killed him? Yes, and she left plenty of evidence:

“In a Facebook message that is now being used as evidence against her, Dutro reportedly told her 24-year-old boyfriend Brian Canady that Zachary had made her mad. The boy was “facing the wall” as punishment.

Using a slur, Dutro wrote that her son was going to be gay.

“He walks and talks like it. Ugh,” the mom wrote.”

Now, where would someone get an idea like that? An idea that states that a child of that age could display homosexual tendencies? An idea that states that a homosexual person is less of a human being than the rest of us and, thus, killing them is justified?

Well, unfortunately for us as a society, those ideas are out there, and they’re loud and well-propagated. James Dobson, a so-called “Christian”, has pushed the idea that children can display homosexual tendencies at a young age:

“In one study of sixty effeminate boys aged four to eleven, 98 percent of them engaged in cross-dressing, and 83 percent said they wished they had been born a girl.
The fact is, there is a high correlation between feminine behavior in boyhood and adult homosexuality. There are telltale signs of discomfort with . . . boys and deep-seated and disturbing feelings that they [are] different and somehow inferior. And yet parents often miss the warning signs and wait too long to seek help for their children. One reason for this is that they are not being told the truth about their children’s gender confusion, and they have no idea what to do about it.

Perhaps you are concerned about your child and his or her “sexual development.” Maybe your son or daughter is saying things like, “I must be gay,” or “I’m bisexual.” You’ve found same-sex porn in his room or evidence that he has accessed it on the Internet. You’ve found intimate journal entries about another girl in her diary. The most important message I can offer to you is that there is no such thing as a “gay child” or a “gay teen.” [But] left untreated, studies show these boys have a 75 percent chance of becoming homosexual or bisexual.”

Ah, my bad. There is no such thing as a “gay child” in this man’s understanding, but children who act “that way” have a high chance of being homosexual or bisexual when they grow up. Maybe the mother in question feared for her child’s future? Because, you know, being gay is a horrible, horrible thing:

“These kids often recognize very early in life that they are “different” from other boys. They may cry easily, be less athletic, have an artistic temperament and dislike the roughhousing that their friends enjoy. Some of them prefer the company of girls, and they may walk, talk, dress and even “think” effeminately. This, of course, brings rejection and ridicule from the “real boys,” who tease them unmercifully and call them “queer,” “fag,” and “gay.” Even when parents are aware of the situation, they typically have no idea how to help. By the time the adolescent hormones kick in during early adolescence, a full-blown gender-identity crisis threatens to overwhelm the teenager. This is what Mark was experiencing when he wrote. And it illustrates why even boys with normal heterosexual tendencies are often terrified that they will somehow “turn gay.””

Could they be terrified because people like Dobson (and his “Focus on the Family” group) have made homosexuality sound like a curse, a disease? Could it be because there are others who say things like:

“I’m guessing the majority of American parents don’t want their little boys turning into sodomites, at this point. if you were to interview, stick a microphone in front of most parents dropping their kids off at the average K-6 school in Colorado where they’re sporting their GLSEN signs everywhere, but if you just interview them and you ask them: “Is your vision for this little 6-year-old boy, 8-year-old boy, 9-year-old, 10-year-old boy that he turn into a sodomite?” My guess is that 60 to 70 percent of them would say, “that would be my worst nightmare.””

That would be their worst nightmare? Not that their child may be dragged away and beaten to a pulp in a field because of something they cannot control? If that’s the case, then I don’t want to live in that society.

Thankfully, we don’t live in that society much anymore. People in the United States are coming around and accepting of people who are not completely heterosexual. Unfortunately, homophobia is on the rise in other parts of the world like Russia and in some countries in the African continent. And for what? What is the fear? That we’ll all turn gay?

We’re all a little gay:

I hope that Pedro (not her real name) and I are the kinds of parents who would not be “shocked and depressed” if one of our children turned out to be gay, because real parents don’t do that. Real parents make the home the safest place for their children, a place where their children can be anything and anyone and not have to fear the big bad world out there. It’s already a scary world as it is.

Some things are no joke

I grew up with strict grandparents and parents. There were plenty of things that us kids could make fun of. We could make fun how other people looked. We could make fun of how other people spoke. We could make fun of each other for doing dumb things. But there was one thing that my elders absolutely did not tolerate: Making fun of other people’s suffering or making fun of someone else’s death, even if the death itself was a joke. Any kind of joking around about that and we were in for a world of hurt.

If you think about it, this is kind of a good rule for society. If we were to all the time put those mourning a death through the anguish of listening to joked about their recently departed, we would collectively be no better than the Westboro Baptist not-a-Church. Similarly, if we were to continuously wish for the death of people we disliked, and joked about their death, we would crumble as a society. A person’s death is a serious thing, and making light of it does absolutely nothing to advance us as a society.

It probably shouldn’t surprise you that there are those in the anti-vaccine camp who are particularly vicious in their attacks of people with whom they disagree. For example, you know about the weirdo’s obsession with Prof. Dorit Reiss. You’ve probably come across the kid’s ramblings about “pharma this” and “pharma that”. They can be vicious attacks filled with misinformation and, many times, outright lies. The comments sections of such blogs are no better. Although anti-vaccine blogs claim that they have “strict” moderation rules, you can see time and again that they are quite open to allow certain vicious comments:

Click to enlarge.

That’s right. Someone who read’s Robert Schecter’s “The Vaccine Machine” blog was happy and could only hope that our friend Ren were dead. Why? What would Ren’s death bring to the world? The story there is that someone with Ren’s exact first, middle, and last names committed suicide in front of dozens of people when he was cornered by police in west Texas. Of course, it wasn’t our friend. Nevertheless, why celebrate such a thing? What kind of mind operates like that?

Comments on Facebook pages don’t get any better. Even without the full ability to hide behind pseudonyms, people will still write some awful things. And they will go after the one man they absolutely despise. I’m talking about Dr. Paul Offit, pediatrician, vaccine developer, and all-around good guy. Like me, he has seen children die of vaccine-preventable diseases. Like anyone with a heart, he became passionate about preventing such deaths and went to work on dispelling myths about vaccines and fighting exemptions from vaccination mandates. And the anti-vaxxers hate him for it.

A few days ago, Reasonable Hank published a blog post where the comment’s section of the National Vaccine (mis)Information Center’s (NVIC) Facebook page were inundated with nothing but threats against Dr. Offit and his family. It turns my stomach to read those comments because these people want to see a man of science suffer and die for saving the lives of thousands, if not tens of thousands, of children.

Yesterday, on April Fool’s Day, it happened again. It was meant as an April Fool’s joke when “The Refusers”, an anti-vaccine organization, decided to publish a fake news story about Dr. Offit dying. The comment’s on Facebook were hideous (click on them to enlarge):

On the blog itself, Australia’s top anti-vaccine activist showed up and was just as lovely as ever:

Click to enlarge

And so on and so forth. They really came out of the woodwork, and they really said some things that would have gotten then taken out to the shed and beaten with a stick by my grandparents… All four of them.

There are some things in life that you just don’t joke about because it holds all of us back from moving forward as a society. People get mad when they’re told that something is not funny or when they are forced to apologize for making light of things like rape and child abuse. Yes, we all have the right to free speech, but none of us have the right to be free from the consequences of our speech. Sometimes those consequences affect all of us.

But it seems to be par for the course for the frontman and others in “The Refusers” to make light of some very serious things, like children dying from vaccine-preventable diseases. The frontman of the group is one Michael Belkin, a well-to-do man from Washington State:

“[A] self-employed financial analyst, he’s got a home office and flexible hours. In his kitchen, he greets his wife Lorna, a willowy portrait painter and stay-at-home mom who’s preparing a crustless quiche for a staff lunch at their kids’ private school, which encourages every child to fulfill his or her “unique destiny.” Belkin rustles around and produces the health-conscious items he gives to his 10-year-old son, Sebastian, and 7-year-old daughter, Viola: fish oil, probiotic supplements, and so-called “perfect food,” made up of grasses and algae. Then he heads downstairs to a daylight basement that allows him to indulge his own creative side. Fifty-seven years old, with a spiky haircut and chunky dark glasses that give him the look of an older Ira Glass, Belkin spent 10 years in Los Angeles trying to make it as a guitarist and songwriter before heading to Wall Street, where he worked for a time at the investment bank Salomon Brothers. Over the past year, he’s built a professional-quality recording studio, with top-notch digital equipment, foam insulation, and a vocal booth, on a little patio outside. From here, he’s been producing a CD by a band he’s put together, in which his son plays drums. His completely unvaccinated son, it should be mentioned. Because the thing that makes Belkin unusual—although far less so than public-health officials would like—is that this suburban dad is a nationally known advocate for what he terms vaccine “choice” and what most others call the anti-vaccine movement.”

Why is he anti-vaccine?

“The reason Belkin is so passionate on the subject can be discerned from yet another song, “Stole My Baby Away.” It’s about his infant daughter, Lyla, who died a day after receiving the Hepatitis B vaccine shot 13 years ago.”

But there are some holes in that story:

“Like many stories in the anti-vaccine movement, though, Belkin’s is murkier than it may seem to true believers—and he doesn’t make it easy to verify crucial details. For that matter, the movement as a whole is based upon theories that are not only unproven but, in key respects, directly contradicted by the past decade of scientific research.”

What? Read on…

“Talking with Belkin in his Bainbridge Island home, it’s apparent that he doesn’t like to be questioned about his account. Easygoing and welcoming when he picks a visitor up from the ferry, he turns irritable when asked for a fuller version of events. “Going into details is very painful,” he says. Yet it soon becomes even more apparent that there are a lot of unanswered questions about his portrayal of Lyla’s death and its aftermath. Asked, for instance, if he is sure that the medical examiner talked to Merck before switching her assessment of Lyla’s death, he says: “I think so. I told her to.” In other words, Belkin’s allegation is based on nothing more than his own suggestion to the examiner, prompted by his suspicions about the vaccine. He’s also not sure, now that he’s asked about it, whether it was the examiner or, as seems more likely, the police who came to his apartment looking for evidence of child abuse. “I don’t know . . . somebody . . . don’t ask me,” he says. Most crucially of all, Belkin says he doesn’t know where the pediatrician’s notes are that prove that the examiner initially determined that Lyla had a swollen brain. “You have to take my word for it,” he says. Later, asked whether he would consent to having the case file from the examiner’s office released to Seattle Weekly, he declines. “To me, it’s a very invasive and intrusive request,” he says, questioning the Weekly’s “fixation” with Lyla’s death. “To me, it’s not the story.” Back in his home, Belkin is more keen to talk about a series of encounters he had after Lyla died that cemented his belief in a pro-vaccine conspiracy.”

Again, par for the course for anti-vaccine activists. Evidence is something that needs to be put aside, and intuition and feelings and conspiracies and theories are all that matter. And, hey, if you have to wish someone dead or make fun of their loss, that’s just one of those things, right?

Can you imagine if I made fun of Belkin’s daughter’s death? If I made up some fake news story that her pediatrician’s notes had been found and that she was confirmed to not have been killed by the vaccine but, rather, that something more sinister had happened to her? If I ever did something like that, I hope you all stop reading this blog and those of you who know me personally drag me out to a shed and beat me senseless with a baseball bat covered in barbed wire. Because it’s not funny to make fun of the death (real or imagined) of another person. It doesn’t move any discussion along. It doesn’t make us better as human beings. It doesn’t save lives or promote freedom or justice or any of that stuff. And it is particularly telling of how much of a psychopath you may be if you make fun of the death of a child.

Then again, we’re not dealing with people who play by the rules or live by the rules. They cannot be reasoned or bargained with. They have only one thing in their minds, and they lock into that with a passion rivaled only by members of hate groups. These people just, seemingly, want to watch the world burn.

 

 

Exploding livers and autism “treatments”

Any anti-vaccine activists worth their weight in salt will tell you that thimerosal is ultimate evil because it contains mercury. Never mind that it is metabolized into ethyl mercury, not methyl mercury. Like ethanol and methanol, there is a difference between ethyl mercury and methyl mercury. One is excreted from the body; the other is accumulated.

To further embarrass themselves, anti-vaccine activists will tell you that vaccines contain formaldehyde, and formaldehyde is all sorts of evil. The problem with their fear mongering over formaldehyde is that the amount of formaldehyde in vaccines is incredibly small. In fact, we make more formaldehyde in our cellular reactions in one day than that in any vaccine. Because of this whole natural selection (evolution) thing, we are able to metabolize formaldehyde into things that don’t hurt us (thank God!). The only time formaldehyde is a problem is if you ingest a quantity much larger than what you’re able to deal with.

This is the case with all ingredients in vaccines. Yes, they have scary names, but, no, they won’t do anything to you. (You get immune reactions, which some can be severe if you’re predisposed to them, but that predisposition makes you the unlucky winner of a lottery with worse odds than most games of chance.)

For some weird reason, giving children bleach solutions to drink and bleach enemas is not bad in the mind of some anti-vaccine parents. They think that bleach will do some magical thing (something not based in science) and “recover” their children from autism. I’m not joking.