Vaccines: opinions are not facts

[cleanhippie]

There’s an old phrase among critical thinkers: you’re entitled to your own opinions, but not your own facts*. The idea is that these are two different things: opinions are matters of taste or subjective conclusions, while facts stand outside that, independent of what you think or how you may be biased.

You can have an opinion that Quisp cereal is, to you, the best breakfast food of all time. But you can’t have the opinion that evolution isn’t real. That latter is not an opinion; it’s objectively wrong. You can have the opinion that the evidence for evolution doesn’t satisfy you, or that evolution feels wrong to you. But disbelieving evolution is not an opinion.

The same can be said for many other topics of critical thinking.

Deakin University Philosophy lecturer Patrick Stokes makes just this case in a well-written piece called No, You’re Not Entitled to Your Opinion. For his basic example of this he uses the modern antivaccination movement, specifically Meryl Dorey and the Orwellain-named Australian Vaccination Network, or AVN.

Dorey’s name is familiar to regular readers: she spews antivax nonsense at nearly relativistic velocities, able to say more provably wrong and blatantly dangerous things than any given antiscience advocate after eight cups of coffee (just how dangerous the antivax movement is has been written about ably by my friend Seth Mnookin in Parade magazine). She never comes within a glancing blow of reality, and has been shown to her face that whatshe says is wrong, but stubbornly refuses to back down. She claims vaccines are connected to autism, that vaccines contain dangerous levels of toxins, that vaccines hurt human immune systems. None of these things is true. Reasonable Hank, who is outspoken about Dorey, has an exhaustive list of the awful things she’s said and done.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2012/10/09/vaccines-opinions-are-not-facts/

[TZ]

1. I can't tell you how many times I've said this

Or how many times I've told people that NIH/CDC/WHO are a little bit better sources than Jenny McCarthy, or Bill Maher or Natural News. Part of the strong anti-intellectual movement in this country sad to say

[HuckleB]

2. Recommended and kicked!

This one is awesome!

[mjrr_595]

3. very interesting article

[ZombieHorde]

4. I agree, but the belief that facts are important is an opinion.

I believe facts and opinions are different from each other, but they are both tools of equal importance or unimportance.

[TZ]

5. Disagree strongly

Your statement totally contradicts the scientific method. For instance, people believe that vaccines are some toxic substances that float around in your body for ages. The fact is, vaccines are modified antibodies, viruses or viral particles that are removed from the bloodstream by the spleen in fairly short order. Thats a HUGE difference. Also you seem to suggest that a belief that the world is only 6,000 years old is the same as the scientific knowledge of actual age. No.
Discerning FACT from OPINION is what SCIENCE is all about after all.

[ZombieHorde]

6. I think you misunderstood what I wrote.

I said facts and opinions are different, so your post does not contradict mine in any way.

I don't believe in inherent value, so I think the belief that facts are better than opinions, is an opinion. They are different, but of equal importance or unimportance.

[TZ]

7. ah sorry

I've run into the new age everything is subjective junk waaay too often.

[ZombieHorde]

8. Understandable.

Our perceptions are subjective, but I believe facts are objective.

[uriel1972]

9. I think of it in this way

There is one reality, but many perceptions and there is one past, but many histories. Our less than perfect sensory systems and brains lead us to this.

on edit: Which is not to say all perceptions and histories are equally valid. Some are closer to reality/past than the others.

[ZombieHorde]

10. I agree with your reply, except I would say

all perceptions are equally valid, but some are closer to the known facts than others.

[SheilaT]

11. I keep on looking at the title of this thread

and I want to say, WHAT??? My opinion isn't as good as a fact??

Anyway, in response to something someone else has posted, to me one of the most amazing things about our immune system is that we are born with some huge number of built-in immune responses to all sorts of things, which is why those born without those built-in immune responses (boy in the bubble anyone?) aren't going to live very long. Also, it's why we are for the most part naturally resistant to all sorts of things.

Which leads me to speculate on such ideas as, absent the development of vaccines, would humans many centuries in the future have been born immune to things like small pox, polio, and so on? Just a speculation, and not intended to suggest that vaccines against these diseases aren't A Very Good Idea.

I'm also led to think and speculate about auto-immune disorders, which are generally though of as the immune system Behaving Very Badly. (My two sons both have alopecia areata, an auto-immune disorder which causes hair loss, so I know a little about such things.) I really wish there were some way to find out about auto-immune disorders in the distant past. I wonder if a different incidence of them would give us clues about modern immune systems.

[TZ]

12. Where did you get the we are naturally resistance idea from?!

You seem to have a poor grasp of basic immunology. Babies immune systems are tabula rosa when born. Thats why BREAST FEEDING IS IMPORTANT. Babies get what few antibodies have from their mothers.
We are naturally resistant to nothing. Its why the young are the most vulnerable to things like influenza and other diseases.
Pediatricians often recommend children go out and play in the dirt so they can build up their immune system. Many immunologists also believe that things like asthma and allergies AND some autoimmune diseases develop in children because their immune system hasn't been exposed enough to learn to function properly. The boy in the bubble comes when some children are born without basic stuff like a class of Immunoglobulins (my sister was born without IgA).
Our immune systems haven't changed much in the past thousands of years. Our environment though has. And the way we treat our children (see believing that getting dirty is bad for kids).
As for resistance to diseases. It would take hundreds if not thousands of years to do that. Also large mortality rates from the disease would be required to eliminate the non resistant population
And as for opinions and facts. I would never EVER think my opinion on say Physics was any where near a fact. I bow to professionals, which too many idiots on the internet don't do.

PS, many autoimmune diseases, have a genetic basis. One of my new drugs for SLE has a genetic test to see who the drug will work best for.

[SheilaT]

13. Perhaps I have misunderstood what i have read.

It is my understanding that when babies are born without a degree of natural immunity to various things, which is what the Immunoglobulins confer (hmmm, wonder where that name came from?) then they fall prey to things that simply don't affect "normal" people.

It's what AIDS, now called HIV does to the immune system, makes it unable to summon its resources to fight off infections, so those who have it tend to get sick with things "normal" people don't.

And I really, really understand the benefits of breast feeding. I think that it is still poorly understood how much passes through the mother's milk, and how resistant a breast-fed baby can be to many illnesses. Especially if the breast-feeding goes on for as long as it would have in the distant past, two to four years. Which is why, if babies are being breast-fed exclusively in the first few months of life, they probably don't need the many vaccines currently recommended.

I know a tiny bit about auto-immune diseases as both of my sons have alopecia areata.

My comment about my opinion not being as good as fact was meant ironically. Sorry to be so subtle.

[LeftishBrit]

14. Another point: evolving resistance to a disease is not necessarily an unalloyed good.

One disease to which lots of people in certain parts of the world. have developed increased genetically-based resistances is malaria. Obviously it is a good thing to be resistant to malaria. However, people, who have copies from both parents of the genes which confer greater resistance to malaria, often have severe congenital blood diseases as a result. Vaccines have far fewer side-effects than so-called Mother Nature.