So, today I was blocked on Facebook. It happens. Especially if you’re engaging with antivax activists plague enthusiasts who don’t particularly like your message. But, I thought the context of this particular blocking too delicious to keep to myself. It started like this: Black took exception to this; apparently she wasn’t actually advocating that people […]
Continue reading
A couple of days ago, a friend sent me a link to a health-related FB page that had published a post from a homeopathist, offering homeopathic “vaccination”¹ against measles (using something called a “Morbillinum nosode” at a “potency” of 200C, which I’ll explain shortly). I followed the link, left a comment asking for evidence that […]
Continue reading
On Monday this week, Seven Sharp carried the story of a Whangārei school where so many of the students are immunised that the school has attained herd immunity against measles. This is an enviable achievement – tautoko, Hora Hora Primary School! Most of the comments are strongly supportive at the moment, but – predictably, not […]
Continue reading
I’ve written previously about an anti-vaxx plague enthusiast claim that measles can cure cancer (it doesn’t). However, it seems that the search for positive attributes for a measles infection knows few bounds. Thus a friend shared this with me – it’s something posted by an antivaxxer in a FB thread: Presumably this is an example […]
Continue readingPretty much everyone in NZ should be aware by now that the country is facing its biggest measles outbreak in years, with Counties Manukau being particularly hard-hit. Here’s the data for the week ending August 23rd, from ESR’s Public Health Surveillance page: This hasn’t stopped those opposed to vaccination plague enthusiasts pushing all their usual […]
Continue readingScience has known for a while now that there is a strong genetic component in autism spectrum disorders (ASD), although those opposed to vaccination tend to deny this. (David Gorski points this out in his commentary on this new 2019 paper.) In this paper, Bai et al. cite data from a meta-analysis of twin studies that […]
Continue readingOne of the things that strikes me about the commenters actively opposing vaccinations – e.g. on the many news stories about NZ’s measles outbreak – is their continued readiness to state and repeat mistruths and inaccuracies. You see it all the time, & I have to wonder – is there just this underlying assumption that […]
Continue reading
New Zealand’s measles outbreak keeps on ticking along. So do the media stories about it. (The FB posts associated with each article aren’t moderated and I suspect this is partly because they generate so many clicks.) A couple of days ago, TVNZ’s Breakfast show carried an interview with a doctor, on the importance of Gardasil, […]
Continue readingMeasles infection has a couple of longer-term sequelae. One, SSPE, is thankfully rare (although for infants with measles the odds of subsequently developing SSPE are considerably higher than for other age groups). The other, “immune amnesia”, is also strongly associated with having had measles, though this doesn’t stop those opposed to vaccination claiming otherwise. In […]
Continue readingUNICEF estimates that in the period 2010-2017, 169 million children missed their first dose of the measles vaccine – that’s around 21 million children each year. Sadly, this has simply set the conditions for the measles outbreaks we’re seeing around the world, in high- and low-income countries alike. In the first three months of 2019, […]
Continue reading