Vaccine inventor gets death threats

[pokerfan]

A few items have come up in the past couple of days about vaccines and the people who understand reality versus the ones who don’t.

1) Paul Offit, who wrote the book Autism’s False Prophets, has a nice writeup in the New York Times this week. He has received all sorts of death threats because he wants to save children’s lives. Nice. Also mentioned are Amanda Peet, who supports Offit, as well as the villains in this story like Jenny McCarthy.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2009/01/14/vaccination-quickies

“When Jonas Salk invented polio vaccine, he was a hero — and I’m a terrorist?"

[sakabatou]

1. Religion...

Still "holy crap."

[Confusious]

4. Its not just the religous people

Its people on the left, who reject religion, but then run after every health fad or "spiritual" thing that comes along.

I don't think the religious nuts would care if the vaccines were preserved in crude oil, they'd probably still take them.

[Warpy]

5. People on both the left and right buy into the bullshit

peddled by the anti science, anti medicine, anti vaccination crowd. They're the ones keeping snake oil salesmen and vitamin hucksters up to their earlobes in luxury.

There is a minor correlation between the antivax and fundy crowds, simply because the fundies aspire to living biblical lives as much as possible and that means exposing their kids to infectious diseases that are god's will.

Evangelicals on the whole, however, have better sense.

[sakabatou]

6. Thank the FSM that I'm an atheist

And that I have critical thinking skills. RAmen.

[MannyGoldstein]

2. Why Do So Many People Hate Science?

So sad and frustrating!

[Avalux]

3. Autism is a plague with no known cause.

Parents of afflicted children naturally want to know why and some blame vaccines. They need to blame something to ease the pain.

Death threats against a vaccine developer are taking that blame to the extreme.

[Tesha]

7. Actually, genetics is pretty clearly part of the cause.

And it kills the parents to believe this, so they thrash about
and blame anything and everything other than their own genes.

We'll eventually figure out what the other co-factors are, but it
probably won't turn out to be vaccines; vaccines form a handy
scapegoat.

Tesha