Comments on: What’s wrong with telling a story?

By: LAM

LAM — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 03:56:11 +0000

Just came across this blog, and I’m very interested in it, looking forward to reading your other entries. I applaud this entry. I agree with you & one who commented about the ripple effect such a story has, and that throwing vaccine fear & hype into the emotional mix of such a story is irresponsible.

By: isles

isles — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 03:08:57 +0000

A story that’s emotional and therefore interesting inevitably has an effect on the reader – unfortunately, when that story is about a parent who believes his or her child was made autistic by vaccines, the effect is likely to be other parents choosing not to vaccinate their own children, which may result in *real* pain, not just the empathetic pain of reading about the original parent’s anguish. It’s too bad reporters who don’t get this aren’t subject to a little pain themselves. Words can cause harm.

By: Joseph

Joseph — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 01:09:19 +0000

Strictly speaking “Autism is not caused by vaccines” is not a statement that could ever be made. It’s impossible to prove that autism is never caused by vaccines. However, the evidence strongly suggests that it is not.

And it’s true that there are environmental factors that are recognized as causal. But to put it in perspective, the biggest risk factor I’ve ever encountered is having an autistic sibbling.

ed. Thanks for keeping me honest, Joseph. I’ve made the edit.

By: Schwartz

Schwartz — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 05:59:04 +0000

Already poor reporting.

“Autism is not caused by vaccines. ”

…

“First, autism is best understood as a genetic disorder, and will remain so until credible evidence comes to light that it is something else. ”

Funny that you didn’t notice the contradiction. You can’t prove it’s genetics, and you wisely caveat your second statement. Contrast that to the first statement issued as if it were fact. Unfortunately, it is not a factual statement since you can’t prove it through science.

“There is currently no accepted scientific evidence to show that Autism is caused by vaccines.”

Now that would be a much more correct wording. If you want scientific credibility, you should be consistent, scientifc and unbiased.

By: Ms. Clark

Ms. Clark — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 01:49:47 +0000

The general public has almost no concept of what “public health” is, and so can’t imagine what would be wrong with making unsupported negative statements about vaccines for fun, for drama, and/or for profit.

Vaccines aren’t the only aspect of public health, but a lot of the other aspects are things like not letting water stand in a bucket in your yard to breed disease carrying mosquitos and not smoking… washing hand, covering your mouth when you cough… but vaccines are different and while there probably aren’t any paranoid psychotics who will rant about the need to cough in public places with nothing covering one’s mouth, there certainly ARE paranoid psychotics (literally) and others who are just fearful of Big Government and Big Pharma who will repeat absolute falsehoods about vaccines in order to dissuade people from trusting them in the least.

The amount of bad information about vaccines out there is massive and we don’t need the media to be helping to disinform the public. Which is not to say that they should only say good things about vaccines or any other drug, but they should TRY to get at the facts and not spread lies about vaccines because the lies are shocking and scary and they sell papers and get people to tune in to TV shows.