ALERT: Demand That CBS Not Air Outdoor Anti-Vaccine Ad!

[Foolmewunz]

I know this wasn't directed to me, but:

A counter campaign, rather than a protest campaign.

If you want to help misinformation spread, draw attention to it by reactively protesting it.

If you want to stunt the spread of misinformation, spread information that crowds it out.

Make a website called vaccineswork.com and take out some provocative ads. Make anti-vaxxers react to you.

A counter-campaign would not be necessary if the anti-vaxxers weren't out there spreading their misinformation. Ergo, call it a counter or a protest, but the need is there only because they're spreading their lies.

I don't know why you feel that protesting is not viable, particularly in this instance. They've created a lovely focal point - Times Square - and are trying to get their lying message out in that location. What's wrong with raising a little ruckus and handing out the "counter" information at the same time?

If I was back in New York, I would've printed up some more appropriately-sourced information, and gotten an air horn and headed to Times Square. Every time the advert appeared, I'd have blasted the air horn and said, "If you want to believe that lying crap, it's your right, but here's some info from decidedly less biased sources than the snake oil this advert is peddling..." Or something to that effect.

 

[Chris Haynes]

OK.... So MMR may have been introduced in 1979 (I'd have to check) but MR (combined measles and rubella) vaccine was given since 1968.


I'm sure the rest of the paper could just as easily be torn apart.

The MMR was introduced in 1971 and has never contained thimerosal.

The paper is pretty much full of it, especially since she actually cites the Geiers, and an incredibly bad anti-vax site called "childhealthsafety." And it is not a good review article when she leaves out several studies, especially those done in the last few years, that do not agree with her anti-vax sentiments.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

The MMR was introduced in 1971 and has never contained thimerosal....

Now that I think about it, I myself was giving MMRs in 1978. Thanks for looking it up.

 

[Emet]

FWIW, the AAP wrote to CBS:

April 13, 2011
Mr. Wally Kelly
Chairman and CEO
CBS Outdoor
405 Lexington Ave., 14th floor
New York, NY 10174

Dear Mr. Kelly,

The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) objects to the paid advertisement/public service message from the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC) being shown throughout the month of April on the CBS JumboTron in Times Square, New York. The AAP and many other child health organizations have worked hard to protect children and their families from unfounded and unscientific misinformation regarding vaccine safety. Vaccines are safe.

By providing advertising space to an organization like the NVIC, which opposes the nation's recommended childhood immunization schedule and promotes the unscientific practice of delaying or skipping vaccines altogether, you are putting the lives of children at risk, leaving them unprotected from vaccine-preventable diseases. Diseases like measles and pertussis (whooping cough) can have serious consequences, including seizures, brain damage and even death. From January 1 through December 31, 2010, 9,477 cases of pertussis (including ten infant deaths) were reported throughout California. This is the most cases reported in 65 years there.

The AAP's 60,000 member pediatricians urge you to remove these harmful messages, which fail to inform the public about the safety of life-saving vaccines. Please do your part to help reassure parents that vaccinating their children on schedule is the best way to protect them from deadly diseases.

Sincerely,

O. Marion Burton, MD, FAAP
President

Orac writes:

Everyone has the right to free speech, but the there is no inherent right to blast that free speech every hour over a huge JumboTron. By accepting the NVIC/Mercola ads, CBS exhibited extreme corporate irresponsibility. Although the ads themselves don't push pseudoscience (at around 15 seconds, they're too short), they do urge viewers to go to the NVIC website to "get informed" about the "risks" of vaccination. Since the NVIC is irredeemably anti-vaccine, the information there is misleading, pseudoscientific, and anti-vaccine to the core. Don't believe me? Just type "NVIC" into the search blog of this blog. Or type "Mercola and vaccine." Then read.

http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2011/04/the_aap_protests_the_anti-vaccine_ads_be.php

 

[Clayton Moore]

That's a deliberately misinformative question. A vaccine is an injection of foreign material, while actual diseases are also caused by an injection of foreign material.

The injector just happens to be a scratch or a cut, or inhalation or ingestion, instead of a needle. That's just semantics as far as the body is concerned. The immune system reacts in exactly the same way.

What common disease other than tetanus do you get from a scratch or a cut? HIV doesn't count.

What multiple diseases enter the body simultaneously as do multiple vaccines?

It should be obvious that foreign material injected into the skin would get a different reception/reaction from the immune system than one inhaled or swallowed.

Has anyone other than possibly an unborn baby become HIV positive by swallowing or inhalation?

Is the concern about vaccines truly about vaccines? Or is it the vulnerability of immature or weakened/under nourished immune systems to vaccines and multiple vaccines?


And then there's the new cervical vaccine.

http://www.naturalnews.com/027196_cancer_cervical_cancer_cancer_vaccine.html#ixzz1KEOQFOrI

Dr. Harper also warned that the cervical cancer vaccine was being "over-marketed" and that parents should be warned about the possible risk of severe side effects from the vaccine. She even concluded that the vaccine itself is more dangerous than the cervical cancer it claims to prevent!

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

Your problem, Clay, is a lack of understanding of how the immune system responds to foreign proteins and your lack of understanding of how various foreign proteins and other chemicals cause disease.

There are many reliable sources that explain these things to people like yourself, but my guess is you discount those valid sources of scientific data and instead rely on information that is full of inaccuracies because that information confirms what you already believe.

As for the Gardasil, you have chosen to accept alarmist lies about the vaccine over the actual scientific evidence. I'm also betting you think all valid scientific evidence comes from profiteering drug companies or duped educated scientists and researchers and instead believe unsupported conspiracy theory speculation and anything with the word, "natural" in it regardless if it also comes from sources making billions of dollars hawking 'supplements' and other ineffective treatments.

 

[Clayton Moore]

Your problem, Clay, is a lack of understanding of how the immune system responds to foreign proteins and your lack of understanding of how various foreign proteins and other chemicals cause disease.

There are many reliable sources that explain these things to people like yourself, but my guess is you discount those valid sources of scientific data and instead rely on information that is full of inaccuracies because that information confirms what you already believe.

As for the Gardasil, you have chosen to accept alarmist lies about the vaccine over the actual scientific evidence. I'm also betting you think all valid scientific evidence comes from profiteering drug companies or duped educated scientists and researchers and instead believe unsupported conspiracy theory speculation and anything with the word, "natural" in it regardless if it also comes from sources making billions of dollars hawking 'supplements' and other ineffective treatments.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gardasil#Safety

An update on adverse events was published by the Journal of the American Medical Association and looked at data from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), covering 12,424 reported adverse events after about 23 million doses of vaccine between June 2006 and December 2008.[42][43] Most adverse effects were minor and not greater than background rates compared with other vaccines, the exception being higher rates for syncope and venous thromboembolic events.[43] Venous thromboembolic events were noted in 56 reports at a rate of 0.2 cases per 100,000 doses distributed and included 19 cases of pulmonary embolism, four of which were fatal.[43] Overall, 772 events (6.2% of the total number of adverse events, but only 0.003% of the total number of doses) were described as serious and included 32 deaths (1 per 1,000,000 doses).[43]

Other adverse events include local site reactions (7.5 cases per 100,000 doses distributed), headaches (4.1 cases per 100,000 doses distributed), hypersensitivity reactions (3.1 cases per 100,000 doses distributed), and urticaria (hives) (2.6 cases per 100,000 doses distributed).[43]

The FDA and the CDC said that with millions of vaccinations "by chance alone some serious adverse effects and deaths" will occur in the time period following vaccination, but have nothing to do with the vaccine.[44] More than 20 women who received the Gardasil vaccine have died, but these deaths have not been causally connected to the shot.[44] Where information has been available, the cause of death was explained by other factors.[45][46] Likewise, a small number of cases of Guillain-Barré Syndrome (GBS) have been reported following vaccination with Gardasil, there is no evidence linking GBS to the vaccine.[12][47][42] It is unknown why a person contracts GBS, or what initiates the disease.[48]

So what do we have?

23 million doses between 2006 and 2008

Administration

Gardasil is given in three 0.5 milliliter injections over six months. The second injection is two months after the first, and the third injection is four months after the second shot was administered.[4][11]

So the number of recipients is about 7.7 million.

12,424 reported adverse events after about 23 million doses

is meaningless since each patient gets 3 doses. The 23 million figure is an over the top, belligerent attempt to obscure the true danger of the vaccine.

So projecting 23 million actual patients would be 3 X 12,424 which is 37,272.

 

[ehcks]

So projecting 23 million actual patients would be 3 X 12,424 which is 37,272.

First, you can't do that. There were 23 million doses and 12 thousand noticeable negative reactions, or an average rate of 0.00052.

You usually ignore rates below .05 as coincidental or errors. This is two orders of magnitude below that.

 

[Skeptiquette]

In order to understand how the immune response from a vaccine may be different than the actual live pathogen, one has to explore the field of innate immunology.

Vaccines, although they have been around for multiple centuries, have been primarily developed using empirical methods, meaning that the actual molecular mechanisms of action are not fully understood. We do understand that for the most part vaccines successfully confer immunity to the person receiving the vaccine, this is the empiric part of our understanding. The challenge that lies ahead is to characterize both the innate and adaptive immune response to vaccines as well as the pathogen of interest, and to develop vaccines based on a thorough understanding of these molecular signatures rather than an empirically based development. BTW this is a very active area of scientific research due to the major technological advances in genomics which is making it possible. Also the resultant vaccines will be both more effective and safer using a molecular approach to understanding and development.

When a vaccine is injected into a subject, the first responders are the immune cells referred to as Dendritic cells (DC’s). There are many different subsets of DC’s dependent on their location in the body. Although these different subsets of DC’s have many of the same cellular surface receptors, they do vary in function and patterns of genetic expression. These immune sentinels have high levels of pattern recognition receptors (PRR’s) which are highly conserved transmembrane (and intracellular) proteins that sense various classes of microbial products, pathogen associated molecular patterns (PAMPs) and microbial associated molecular patterns (MAMPs). The transmembrane PRRs are typically referred to as Toll-Like Receptors (TLRs) but there are also other classes of PRRs which are not found anchored in the plasma membrane, but rather intracellularly. One of these classes of PRRs is the Nod Like receptor (NLR) these receptors float around intracellularly and sense both viral and bacterial products as well as host “danger signals” such as higher concentrations of reactive oxygen species (ROS), DNA fragments/adducts, etc.

It is the orchestrated effort of the various innate immune signals which arise from activation of these receptors which dictate the adaptive immune response. Therefore, it is erroneous to state that there is no difference between the immune response to a pathogen versus the immune response to a vaccine. It is also erroneous to say that there is no difference in the immune response to a vaccine that is injected IM versus one that is taken orally.

As researchers start to discover the underlying parameters of innate immunity which orchestrate the adaptive immune response, it is clear that the simplistic approach that is seen here is, well, misleading at best.

 

[Clayton Moore]

In order to understand how the immune response from a vaccine may be different than the actual live pathogen, one has to explore the field of innate immunology.

Vaccines, although they have been around for multiple centuries, have been primarily developed using empirical methods, meaning that the actual molecular mechanisms of action are not fully understood. We do understand that for the most part vaccines successfully confer immunity to the person receiving the vaccine, this is the empiric part of our understanding. The challenge that lies ahead is to characterize both the innate and adaptive immune response to vaccines as well as the pathogen of interest, and to develop vaccines based on a thorough understanding of these molecular signatures rather than an empirically based development. BTW this is a very active area of scientific research due to the major technological advances in genomics which is making it possible. Also the resultant vaccines will be both more effective and safer using a molecular approach to understanding and development.

When a vaccine is injected into a subject, the first responders are the immune cells referred to as Dendritic cells (DC’s). There are many different subsets of DC’s dependent on their location in the body. Although these different subsets of DC’s have many of the same cellular surface receptors, they do vary in function and patterns of genetic expression. These immune sentinels have high levels of pattern recognition receptors (PRR’s) which are highly conserved transmembrane (and intracellular) proteins that sense various classes of microbial products, pathogen associated molecular patterns (PAMPs) and microbial associated molecular patterns (MAMPs). The transmembrane PRRs are typically referred to as Toll-Like Receptors (TLRs) but there are also other classes of PRRs which are not found anchored in the plasma membrane, but rather intracellularly. One of these classes of PRRs is the Nod Like receptor (NLR) these receptors float around intracellularly and sense both viral and bacterial products as well as host “danger signals” such as higher concentrations of reactive oxygen species (ROS), DNA fragments/adducts, etc.

It is the orchestrated effort of the various innate immune signals which arise from activation of these receptors which dictate the adaptive immune response. Therefore, it is erroneous to state that there is no difference between the immune response to a pathogen versus the immune response to a vaccine. It is also erroneous to say that there is no difference in the immune response to a vaccine that is injected IM versus one that is taken orally.

As researchers start to discover the underlying parameters of innate immunity which orchestrate the adaptive immune response, it is clear that the simplistic approach that is seen here is, well, misleading at best.

Then there could be some sort of rare shock to the patient from the inoculation/inoculations/vaccine(s) and what is going on in the body that day. Or a carryover from another vaccine. Confusion of the immune system while dealing with vaccines at different stages of an immunization process/processes. An erratic response to a resource shortage dealing with similar or multiple or conflicting vaccines.

 

[technoextreme]

It should be obvious that foreign material injected into the skin would get a different reception/reaction from the immune system than one inhaled or swallowed.

Nope. Used to have foreign stuff injected into my skin on a weekly basis for years and years. Wasn't all that different than sniffing, eating, rubbing, or whatever other form of exposure you can think of.

 

[Prometheus]

Then there could be some sort of rare shock to the patient from the inoculation/inoculations/vaccine(s) and what is going on in the body that day. Or a carryover from another vaccine. Confusion of the immune system while dealing with vaccines at different stages of an immunization process/processes. An erratic response to a resource shortage dealing with similar or multiple or conflicting vaccines.

Why not just blame the proverbial butterfly flapping its wings in a South American rainforest?