Dr. Gordon's at it again
I know. You're tired of Dr. Gordon's antics. I am too, which is why this will be uncharacteristically brief. Everything I said here applies to his most recent post.
Dr. Gordon, the Huffington Post's resident anti-vaccination blogger, is once again dissing a vaccine study solely on the basis of its funding source. As usual, he hasn't looked at the study itself critically to tell us why it should be ignored on the basis of the study design and science. Instead, he just makes his usual dark insinuations that because the study was funded by a pharmaceutical company and because the author of a commentary on the study has served as a consultant to that company that the study is automatically bad. (He also attributes shingles to "when the chicken pox vaccine is reactivated in normal adults." Odd. His own link states that shingles is due to the reactivation of the chickenpox virus in adults who had chickenpox as children.) Fortunately, a doctor by the name of Dr. Slavin is there to "comment."
Quoth Dr. Slavin:
Amen.
Dr. Gordon, the Huffington Post's resident anti-vaccination blogger, is once again dissing a vaccine study solely on the basis of its funding source. As usual, he hasn't looked at the study itself critically to tell us why it should be ignored on the basis of the study design and science. Instead, he just makes his usual dark insinuations that because the study was funded by a pharmaceutical company and because the author of a commentary on the study has served as a consultant to that company that the study is automatically bad. (He also attributes shingles to "when the chicken pox vaccine is reactivated in normal adults." Odd. His own link states that shingles is due to the reactivation of the chickenpox virus in adults who had chickenpox as children.) Fortunately, a doctor by the name of Dr. Slavin is there to "comment."
Quoth Dr. Slavin:
Before flaming the entire industry and well respected clinicians and researchers, I would suggest seriously reading both the study and editorial and determining for yourself if financial bias played any role in the results or editorial comments.
I got an email from him.
ReplyDeleteHe seems to feel that most of the vaccines children get in the USA are for diseases they will never come into contact with.
He feels that there should be different cost/risk analyses done in the US than elsewhere where those diseases are more endemic.
Has the man never heard of an airplane?
Has he not figured out that polio actually left Nigeria to run rampant in Yemen and Indonesia? That the risk/assessment was done so that American kids get the IPV instead of OPV?
Has he not figured out that Indiana right now has a large resurgence of measles? Just like what happened in Iowa, Alabama and Washington?
That a man in Pennsylvania died from diptheria he got from going to an island not that far from Florida?
http://www.immunize.org/stories/story63.htm
Or that rubella was brought into a largely unvaccinated religious community in Canada? (Okay, maybe he does not think Canada counts... note to the Canadian Cynic -- all my inlaws are Canadian!)
Or that pertussis is still killing American babies? Or that chicken pox still maims and kills Americans (granted it is not a large number, but what is an acceptible limit, 100 or none)? That doctors do not really want to watch helplessly while a child gets meningitis from Hib? That the infant vaccination for HepB actually worked to reduce the numbers?
It's sad how someone with Dr. Gordon's level of education can be so dishonest in his public presentations. I commented on one of his first HuffPo posts on my own blog because there were no comments allowed on his post. Seesh... I'm a software engineer and I can see the problems with his arguments, as well as his science (or lack thereof.)
ReplyDeleteHe's also got a post up blaming childhood obesity on too much milk/cheese -- the real culprit? The milk industry.
I'm only a structural engineer, but even I know that diseases do not respect international borders.
ReplyDeleteA correction to my earlier comment... I had posted about David Kirby, another anti-vacc on HuffPo and even less honest than Dr. Gordon.
ReplyDeleteAh, then you may be interested in reading http://www.neurodiversity.com/evidence_of_venom.html ... which is refenced in an earlier Oracknows posting.
ReplyDeleteActually, the older posts on the Huffington Post blog don't allow comments, but more recent ones do.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, I really hate the way the Huffington Post blog is arranged. It's ugly and hard to find what you might be interested in.