There is a substantial number of blogs and websites out
there devoted to anti-vaccine promotion; many of them claim otherwise, but it is often easy to gauge from the
very name that we are talking some hardcore science denialism. Sane Vax is one such.
Their official mission is “to promote Safe, Affordable, Necessary &
Effective vaccines and vaccination practices through education and
information,” and the underlying premise is accordingly that vaccines of today
are largely unsafe (or not sane, which does indeed emphasize the lunacy of the group).
Jeffry John Aufderheide blogs for Sane Vax, and does so by
combining utter scientific ignorance with paranoia in a manner that rivals the
worst. He also writes for – indeed, was the founder of – VacTruth.org, the name
of which is equally revealing. His article “WWII Military Handbook Reveals
Pesticide Chemicals Used In Infant Vaccines” made its rounds in the expected
parts of the Internet, and described Aufderheide’s shock reaction to
discovering that some vaccines contain Triton X-100, Tween 20, or Tween 80,
which, he discovered in said handbook, were also “used as major components of
spraying operations of DDT.” And now, readers, you probably already see what conclusions Aufderheide is going to draw,
and also why they reveal such abysmal ignorance of anything remotely resembling
anything having to do with science. A sample: “To minimize the above
information, you may hear arguments about the chemicals being safe because they
are in hand soaps, ice cream, and in our lungs (natural surfactant). For the
record, I’ve never seen a mother feeding or injecting a newborn with soap or
ice cream. My word of advice to mothers is follow your intuition and ask a lot
of questions.” That is some hardcore
ignorance going on.
A similar level of crazy can for instance be found in his “History
shows polio caused by pesticide exposure, then was eradicated by decline in DDT
use.” Yes, it claims that polio was really caused by pesticides, and that doctors have been wrong all along.
Do you need to know what his argument is? Oh yes, there’s correlation; that’s
enough for Aufderheide, who has apparently never heard of the distinction between correlation and causation.
Of course, the correlation doesn’t exist either,
which even he might probably have discovered if he’d bothered to look more closely (probably not) – the
decline in polio preceded the decline in the use of DDT. But I guess that
“close enough” sufficed for Aufderheide.
Diagnosis: Yet another one. I don’t really know how
influential Aufderheide actually is, but his articles sometimes get picked up
by others, and whatever the amount of influence is, it sure isn’t beneficial.
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