JayB

Would you feel better if establishing politically favored cartels to allocate resources was the nation's official policy?

In a gross and obvious conflict of interest, Wakefield received nearly $700K from a law firm intending to file lawsuits linking vaccination with autism using the results of Wakefield's study, which could not be replicated. Damning enough evidence for the UK to revoke his license. Smear campaign? When he tried to sue his journalist detractors for libel, he lost. I rest my case. Resting your case to agree with me? You really don't read do you? Once more with feeling: I have not argued that Wakefield did not fraud the public. This is old news. (Nearly as old as his "report") What you appear to overlook is that he was NOT anti vaccine. HE was specifically anti the MMR vaccine and recommended getting the vaccines for Measles, Mumps and Rubella as separate vaccinations. ...in order to profit from his fraudulent attempt link the MMR vaccine to autism. Distinction without much difference as far as the impact on public health is concerned. At the end of the day no one cares whether the guy was only opposed to the vaccines that he thought he could undermine for his own profit with bogus research, or vaccines in general.

When the plague comes, you'll find him safe and sound in his carbon neutral root cellar.

Not unless it's embedded within a paper that contains empirical proof sufficient to overwhelm the current scientific consensus concerning vaccines and autism - but go ahead.

So...citing Sears/Healy/etc and refusing to make simple declarative statements about whether or not you've vaccinated your own little tyke was just a roundabout way of promoting the pertussis booster shot for adults?

Seems to want to maintain a vaguely anti-vaccine stance without providing any concrete scientific justification for such a position, because there is none. The belief that vaccines have any connection whatsoever to autism ranks right up there with the theory that HIV doesn't cause aids. Tread Carefully on the Path of Unreason Kimmo-san...

So when are you going to admit what we're talking about here--not to let the thread drift back to its point--the dude out and out lied, it was an obvious lie, still many so-called google experts believed him (and ranted and raved and were otherwise totally full of shit), kids got sick and died, and in the end the asshole got caught. Time to come on down from that tree or sign up for one of those 'Denali for Christ' climbs, either way, I don't care, the point has been settled: FRAUD!!!!!!!!!!! But did you get your pertussis booster....?

Does anyone? You keep bringing this up - not sure why. i bring it up because the pertussis vaccine loses efficacy after 5 years. meaning, if you have not had the vaccine in the last five years, you risk contagion and then passing it on to others. simple. which means that anyone who is stridently "pro-vaccine" should, logically, make sure their own vaccinations are up to date. kapisce? You can be pro-vaccine - as in, accepting the overwhelming scientific consensus and the abundant empirical evidence that vaccines are safe and effective - without getting vaccinations against diseases that pose little or no risk to healthy adults. I'm a big fan of the smallpox vaccine, for example, but I haven't personally been vaccinated against it since it's been eradicated and only persists in a handful of BL4 laboratories. You make a fair point that it would be better if everyone got their boosters so they'd be less likely to transmit the disease to small children - but it doesn't follow that failure to do so undermines their belief in the safety and efficacy of vaccines in general.

And treatable. Most of the time. http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/803186-overview Can't fathom people who freak-out about their children's exposure to sub-sub-trace levels of pesticides and quadruple wash their "organic" fruits and veggies and then leave their children exposed to infectious diseases that are infinitely more hazardous.

Word. "Methylmercury is found in low levels in water, infant formula and breast milk. Although it is clear that large quantities of mercury can damage the nervous system, there is no evidence that the small quantities contained in water, infant formula and breast milk do. An infant who is exclusively breastfed will ingest more than twice the quantity of mercury that was ever contained in vaccines and fifteen times the quantity of mercury contained in the influenza vaccine" http://www.chop.edu/service/vaccine-education-center/hot-topics/thimerosal.html

that's a heck of a leap there, for a rational robot such as yourself. I didn't realize citing a particular source meant in any way a particular allegiance to an ideology. wait, i forgot who i'm talking to. which conclusions? i might conclude from your above quote that you may have been immersed in grad school just a wee bit too long, my friend. but, since i have you on the line, tell me about some double blind studies on the subject. No one conducts double blind studies with proven vaccines, since no institutional review board would approve a study in which parents were told that their children were being vaccinated against measles, etc when they weren't. What has been done are large scale studies that looked for a statistical association between vaccination with the MMR vaccine and autism, and exposure to thimerosol and autism. That is - they compared vaccinated and unvaccinated children and used statistical methods to determine whether or not children who had been exposed to either the MMR vaccine or thimerosol were at higher risk for developing autism. Here's a link to a large scale study that looked for a statistical association between the MMR vaccine and autism: http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa021134 "We conducted a retrospective cohort study of all children born in Denmark from January 1991 through December 1998. The cohort was selected on the basis of data from the Danish Civil Registration System, which assigns a unique identification number to every live-born infant and new resident in Denmark. MMR-vaccination status was obtained from the Danish National Board of Health. Information on the children's autism status was obtained from the Danish Psychiatric Central Register, which contains information on all diagnoses received by patients in psychiatric hospitals and outpatient clinics in Denmark. We obtained information on potential confounders from the Danish Medical Birth Registry, the National Hospital Registry, and Statistics Denmark. Of the 537,303 children in the cohort (representing 2,129,864 person-years), 440,655 (82.0 percent) had received the MMR vaccine. We identified 316 children with a diagnosis of autistic disorder and 422 with a diagnosis of other autistic-spectrum disorders. After adjustment for potential confounders, the relative risk of autistic disorder in the group of vaccinated children, as compared with the unvaccinated group, was 0.92 (95 percent confidence interval, 0.68 to 1.24), and the relative risk of another autistic-spectrum disorder was 0.83 (95 percent confidence interval, 0.65 to 1.07). There was no association between the age at the time of vaccination, the time since vaccination, or the date of vaccination and the development of autistic disorder." Here's a link to a study that evaluated the prevalence of autism before and after thimerosol* was removed from virtually all childhood vaccines: http://archpsyc.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/abstract/65/1/19 "Context Previous analyses of autism client data reported to the California Department of Developmental Services (DDS) have been interpreted as supporting the hypothesis that autism is caused by exposure to the preservative thimerosal, which contains ethylmercury. The exclusion of thimerosal from childhood vaccines in the United States was accelerated from 1999 to 2001. The Immunization Safety Review Committee of the Institute of Medicine has recommended surveillance of trends in autism as exposure to thimerosal during early childhood has decreased. Conclusions The DDS data do not show any recent decrease in autism in California despite the exclusion of more than trace levels of thimerosal from nearly all childhood vaccines. The DDS data do not support the hypothesis that exposure to thimerosal during childhood is a primary cause of autism." Here's another study on the same topic, that reached the same conclusion: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16818529?dopt=Abstract *Thimerosol = Ethyl mercury. Very different from methyl mercury. Kind of like the difference between ethanol and methanol. Some of the alarm over the mercury levels in vaccines was apparently generated by people who weren't aware of that. http://www.who.int/vaccine_safety/topics/thiomersal/statement_jul2006/en/index.html There you go. Probably old news since you've been pouring over the literature when you haven't been immersed in the immunology text?

absolutely. been there done that. your point? The fact that you cite Healy and Sears as opposed to the large scale clinical/epidemiological studies that have been conducted to address any connection between the MMR vaccine, or thimerosol, and autism suggests that you're not actually familiar with the science or the scientific literature. What specific large scale clinical/epidemiological studies are you basing your conclusions on, and which graduate level immunology text did you study? In what way does the combination of the two support your conclusion that the medical risks presented by vaccination outweigh the benefits?

Kimmo-sabe: If you're really interested in the "truth' - that is, the closest approximation available to mankind at any given moment in time - you should at least take the time to understand what the scientific consensus is. That is, what the people who have the most salient expertise and training, and comprehensive knowledge of the literature, and familiarity with the most up-to-date literature believe to be the case. That's not perfect, it is subject to change when new evidence becomes available - but it's much more reliable than the voice of the lone heretic, no matter how impressive their credentials may seem. There have definitely been cases where the lone heretic has prevailed, but they've done so on the strength of the evidence that they've been able to back their claims with - not their credentials alone. The guy who became convinced that ulcers were caused by H.Pylori is a good example of the lone heretic who prevailed. Linus Pauling is a good example of a brilliant investigator - one of the most brilliant chemists of the 20th century - who doggedly championed an idea (the health benefits ofmegadoses of vitamin C) that was ultimately rejected for lack of evidence. If you're going to take a step as dramatic as deciding not to vaccinate your child, I think that you should at least ground that decision on something firmer than an odd quote or two from Bernadine Healy that seem vaguely sympathetic to the claims of vaccine denialists. In the past ten years alone there have been dozens and dozens of large-scale clinical and epidemiological investigations into the claims that the MMR vaccine, thimerisol, etc cause autism. If you're going to persist in a serious conversation about vaccines, you should not only familiarize yourself with this literature, but you should also at the very least acquire a graduate-level immunology text and study it carefully so that you are able to understand what you're reading.

"What you're really seeing is groundswell," says Mike Meno of the Marijuana Policy Project. "There was a poll in October showing that 81 percent of Americans nationally support medical-marijuana laws. I always tell people, What other public-policy issue can 81 percent of Americans agree on?" One factor Meno cites is the Tea Party movement, especially the libertarian streak represented by Ron Paul, who frames pot legalization as yet another states' rights issue. "People don't want government telling them what they can use to unwind with after work," Meno says. http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/marijuana-legalization-by-state-071410 ~25% of Republicans support marijuana legalization, vs ~55% of democrats. I'd be surprised if the number isn't higher amongst people who self identify as members of the Tea Party, since there appears to be a stronger libertarian streak in the Tea Party movement than there is in the mainstream Republican party. If you've got data that support your claim that there's a unified sense of opposition to drug legalization amongst Tea Party types, post away.

[video:youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86hvzQsimJw&feature=related

“You know what, I think it’s about time we legalize marijuana. Hear me out for a second…” Beck told viewers in April. “We have to make a choice in this country. We have to either put people who are smoking marijuana behind bars, or we legalize it. But this little game we’re playing in the middle is not helping us, is not helping Mexico, and is causing massive violence on our southern border.” [video:youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQoCWQ2UnJo&feature=related http://www.newsweek.com/2010/10/25/the-conservative-case-for-legalizing-pot.html

I thought you were speaking about tea party types in particular, where you've got a far higher concentration of libertarians than any other identifiable political movement in America at the moment. Since libertarians are more uniformly in favor of complete, immediate legalization than any other political group in society, your claim that tea party types are uniformly against legalizing drugs in general, and marijuana in particular is more of a projection on your part than an empirical truth that you can actually establish with real data.

[video:youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bM7ogVjFe4w

Non Libertarian Wing-Nut Flying Pig Alert! Keep listening until 0:48.. [video:youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rL-7jvH7MCc

http://motherjones.com/politics/2010/09/tea-party-marijuana-legalization "You find more Republican candidates right now espousing legalization of marijuana than you do Democrats." Advertise on MotherJones.com He's probably right, says Allen St. Pierre, head of the pro-legalization National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), which funnels 80 percent of its political donations to Democrats. "Republicans are definitely more on the record in terms of support for ending prohibition," he says. While pot-friendly pols from either side of the aisle are still rare species, the GOP variety tends to voice unequivocal support for outright legalization. Republican exemplars include ex-Colorado GOP congressman Tom Tancredo (now running for governor on the American Constitution Party ticket) and the GOP challengers to Reps. Barney Frank and Nancy Pelosi. Nobody, of course, is more outspoken on the issue than Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), the 2008 presidential hopeful and tea party patron saint, who recently wrote that "decriminalizing marijuana at the federal level would be a start" to ending "the insanity of the War on Drugs." Think the libertarian wing-nuts are typically far more inclined to support full-tilt legalization than your typical progressive. [video:youtube] [video:youtube]

No point in reforming campaign finance if all of the economic incentives that induce concentrated economic interests to throw money at congress for tax breaks, subsidies, etc are still in place. That'd be a great stimulus for the attorneys that get paid to find loopholes in existing campaign finance laws, but that's about it.

Eliminate tax breaks/subsidies that favor particular sectors, industries, or individual businesses in exchange for lower marginal rates for everyone a la' Reagan and Tip O'Neil in 86. Only way to generate an aggregated economic interest behind eliminating tax breaks for particular players that's more powerful than the interest behind each particular tax exemption.

Who knows. Might have never been developed if it looked like it would be impossible to sell the power for enough to pay for the costs of generating it. How would society be worse off in that scenario? Without more subsidies the nuclear industry is going nowhere from here, so you can bet it would never have happened but I can't tell if we'd be better off, even though the negative of nuclear are very large. The model of subsidies in nuclear isn't the exception, it's the general rule with a few exceptions where taxpayer subsidy didn't play a role. Where would the highway lobby (automobile/tire/oil) be without taxpayer funded roads? They'd probably be stuck with private toll roads. Are you happy to have subsidized urban sprawl, the abandonment of inner cities, more C02 emissions, etc?

Compared to...what? You really think corporate power is *undermined*, consumer welfare is enhanced, and political power more evenly dispersed under an explicit cartelization program? The fact that a concentrated economic interest can make leftists believe it's going to be less potent and more inclined to act in the public interest if the state grants it a monopoly and enacts legislation to insulate it from competition might be one of the greatest marketing coups of all time.

Who knows. Might have never been developed if it looked like it would be impossible to sell the power for enough to pay for the costs of generating it. How would society be worse off in that scenario?