# 5023
Fear and hysteria are wonderful weapons - and can undermine the sensibilities of even normally reasonable people - as Rod Serling demonstrated so aptly in the classic 1960 episode of the Twilight Zone, The Monsters are Due on Maple Street.
All it takes is for someone to instill a bit of doubt . . . a modicum of suspicion . . . backed up by random, but seemingly connected events . . . and our insecurities, fears, and prejudices do the rest.
In the 1950s, our collective paranoia was focused externally . . . on the communist threat, and on nuclear annihilation.
Today, our animus is more likely to be reserved for our own government, and for large, profitable corporations (who we all know are evil incarnate).
Over the past couple of decades, we’ve become generation X-files, where we believe there is a governmental conspiracy behind absolutely everything.
Belief in these all-powerful, manipulative, and evil plots gives us comfort, I suppose . . . since they absolve us of any responsibility for our own failings and disappointments.
We shake our fists and rail at `them’ because it’s so much easier than dealing with the alternative.
And it is at this point that I must admit to not being completely immune to this collective form of insanity.
While I like to think of myself as being strictly an `evidence based’, rational thinker . . . I’m willing to at least entertain the idea that some conspiracy theories are more `plausible’ than others.
I’m just damn selective in what unsupported scenarios I’m willing to abide (or worse, embrace), and try to show a little restraint in publicly voicing them.
It’s one thing to believe in a theory when there is little evidence to the contrary, but quite another when the evidence is overwhelmingly against it.
But for the anti-vaccine contingent, that doesn’t seem to be much of an impediment.
Practically every day I see articles on the internet purporting to tell the `truth’ about vaccines, and in nearly every case it is about as far removed from the truth as you can get and still remain on this planet.
Their techniques are simple, but effective.
First, they use biased and inflammatory language, filled with incendiary adjectives like `deadly’, `useless’, `dangerous’, or `untested’ practically anytime the word `vaccine’ is used.
Second, they build a straw man, by claiming that vaccines are supposed to be 100% safe and effective (which no one in medicine claims), and then proceed to knock that down with some story about a purported bad reaction or side effect.
And third . . . and used with great effect online . . . they cherry pick a news article that somehow bolsters their claims, without acknowledging any evidence to the contrary.
An ongoing example are the stories proliferating on the Internet claiming that Australia Banned The 2010 Flu Vaccine due to side effects.
A quick Google of `Australia banned vaccine’ comes up with these top 4 web headlines.
About 252,000 results (0.18 seconds)
Australian Health Authorities Banned The 2010 Flu Vaccine
Flu Vaccine Banned in Australia but safe in the US?????
Australia bans flu vaccines in children after vomiting, fevers ...
Australian Health Authorities Banned The 2010 Flu Vaccine -
Is it true? Well . . . no, not really.
A temporary moratorium was put in place on giving the 2010 flu shot to children under the age of 5 after an unusual number of febrile convulsions were observed (see Australia Investigating Adverse Vaccine Reactions).
That moratorium was LIFTED a full month before these web stories appeared (see Ban on flu vaccine for young children lifted), after only CSL’s Fluvax was found to have caused an unusual number of reactions.
But those are just messy details that get in the way of a good story.
The Narcolepsy-Pandemrix story from last August is another example.
Questions were raised about the H1N1 Pandemrix vaccine after a small, but unusual number of cases of narcolepsy were observed in Finland, Sweden and France.
The anti-vaccine forces immediately started calling this a `probable link’, even though there was no evidence to support that assertion.
In fact, within a couple of weeks it became apparent that any evidence of a link – if one exists at all – is pretty darn faint (see EMA Update On The Pandemrix-Narcolepsy Investigation and Sweden: No Link Between Pandemrix And Narcolepsy).
Yes, studies are ongoing. And it is possible that some link may be established in the future. But right now, there is no `probable link’.
Today a `shocking report’ is making the rounds that more than 3,500 miscarriages and/or still births may have been caused by last year’s H1N1 vaccine in the United States. I’m hesitant to even provide a link to this story, but here it is nonetheless.
Go ahead and read it. I’ll wait.
The story demonizes the CDC, ACIP, and of course, flu vaccines by quoting an activist organization (NCOW) – using their own polling and data from VAERS reports – that has estimated that 1588 fetal deaths may have been caused by the vaccine.
What this story doesn’t tell the reader is that there are nearly 1 million miscarriages every year in the United States. Roughly 2,500 a day.
And if you vaccinated all of the pregnant women in the country today, tomorrow, 2,500 would have a miscarriage.
And 2,500 would the day after that, and another 2,500 the next day . . .
And it would have nothing to do with having taken the vaccine.
Could the flu vaccine have contributed to some small number of miscarriages?
Well, yes. It is certainly possible.
But that sort of thing is awfully hard to accurately ascertain when we are talking about 1,500 possible cases amongst a background rate of 1 million miscarriages a year.
But you don’t need proof to bring out the monsters on to Vaccine Street.
All you need is the allegation.
Never mind the good that vaccines do, or the lives they save (subjects rarely addressed by the anti-vaccine crowd). If they are shown to be anything less than perfect - or not 100% benign - they are apparently worthy of our suspicion and mistrust.
A impossibly high standard, by the way, that no medicine or drug can hope to reach.
In searching for a closing for this blog, I can come up with nothing that comes close to the closing narration by that master of prose . . . Rod Serling, from more than 50 years ago.
“The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices, to be found only in the minds of men.
For the record, prejudices can kill and suspicion can destroy, and a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all of its own - for the children, and the children yet unborn.
And the pity of it is that these things cannot be confined to the Twilight Zone”
A pity, indeed.
Note: This first week of November a number of vaccine critics have announced their intent to promote an Internet `Vaccine Awareness Week’ to promote their agenda.
Hence my humble offering this morning.
Staff Writer