The Arrogance of Ignorance: Anti-Vaccine Website Blunders Again
Misnamed anti-vaccine website Child Health Safety posted a blog recently in which a number of surprising claims were made with great certainty. I thought these claims sounded very dubious and it turned out that they were. It’s taken me a few days to get round to posting this debunking partly because, unlike Child Health Safety, I like to check my facts before I publish. Read the rest of this entry »
The Anti-Vaccine Movement: A Terrible Track Record
Anti-vaccinationists have made a wide range of claims about the dangers of vaccines. In spite of the fact that they have generally had neither data nor a plausible mechanism for the claimed effect, several of their claims have been investigated by researchers.
As it turns out, the anti-vaccinationists are remarkably consistent. Time and time again, they are shown to be wrong. I’m not sure how many times a group needs to be wrong before people stop seeing them as credible. Perhaps people need to be reminded of how many times this group has been wrong? Read the rest of this entry »
The Independent: Flu Vaccine “Over-hyped”
Main news article
Here, the Independent have a story about the flu vaccine being over-hyped. It seems to me that the message from scientists is that (a) the vaccine is not as effective as was thought (b) this over-estimation means there has been less focus on the development of better vaccines against influenza and (c) the money spent on the annual flu vaccine campaign could have been better used elsewhere. Oh, and (d) the vaccine is “the best we have” and they support its use. I’m not sure that this message has been put across by the newspaper as well as it might have been. Read the rest of this entry »
WDDTY: McTaggart, McCartney and HPV Vaccination
After the What Doctors Don’t Tell You magazine’s October issue was published, Margaret McCartney, a GP, had an article in the BMJ criticising it. Some of the criticism related to Lynne McTaggart’s commentary on the HPV vaccines (something I wrote about here). McCartney took issue with the comments regarding deaths following HPV vaccination, stating that “to suggest that it has led to death is alarmist and does not reflect or explain the evidence collated by the Food and Drug Administration”. McTaggart has now responded to McCartney’s article in a blog post. Read the rest of this entry »
What Doctor’s Don’t Tell You and the HPV Vaccine
The magazine What Doctor’s Don’t Tell You (WDDTY), who have apparently threatened Simon Singh with legal action, are at the centre of a row over the content of their magazine and its appearance on the shelves of several major retailers. Blogger JQH gave his views on the magazine’s content here and Andy Lewis of the Quackometer blog asked the question should WHSmith stock the magazine. (Josephine Jones has now gathered a list of blogs covering the complaints and legal threat here.) I decided to take a look at the WDDTY article on the HPV vaccine. I was not impressed.
Warning: some of the quotes in this blog post may contain misinformation. Please carefully evaluate what you read.
On page 29, the article by Lynne McTaggart claims that the vaccine is “a dubious, untested, ineffective and highly dangerous solution” to the problem of cervical cancer.
A CDC page describes a number of randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled studies of Gardasil. It seems to me that to describe the vaccine, without any qualifiers, as “untested” is misleading.You can find further studies of Gardasil on Pubmed, including systematic reviews. Like this one, for example. The article later claims, in large text, that “Gardasil was never tested in young teenaged women”. This is number 10 in a list of 14 ‘facts’. Here is the full text of a paper that looked at HPV vaccination in young people. They didn’t use the same outcomes as the previous trials referred to but they did test the immunogenicity and safety of the vaccine in over 500 girls aged 10-15. It’s worth noting that none of the serious adverse events suffered by participants was linked to the vaccine. Gardasil may not have been tested in the manner that McTaggart would like it to have been, but it most certainly is not “untested”.
The CDC’s section on efficacy describes the vaccine as having “a high efficacy for prevention of vaccine HPV type HPV 6-, 11-, 16-, and 18-related persistent infection, vaccine type-related CIN, CIN 2/3, and external genital lesions (genital warts, VIN and VaIN)” in participants receiving three doses of the vaccine who had no protocol violations and had not previously been infected with HPV. It seems that Gardasil does in fact do what it is claimed to do – prevent HPV infection and the abnormal growth of squamous cells on the surface of the cervix. In this, it is effective.
McTaggart uses VAERS data to support her suggestion that the vaccine is dangerous. Sorry, “highly dangerous”. Here’s what the VAERS website says about interpreting data:
When evaluating data from VAERS, it is important to note that for any reported event, no cause-and-effect relationship has been established. Reports of all possible associations between vaccines and adverse events (possible side effects) are filed in VAERS. Therefore, VAERS collects data on any adverse event following vaccination, be it coincidental or truly caused by a vaccine. The report of an adverse event to VAERS is not documentation that a vaccine caused the event.
McTaggart also refers to deaths in India. As Andy Lewis points out, these deaths included a drowning, a snake bite and the effects of malaria. Using deaths that are clearly unrelated to the vaccine in order to spread fear about Gardasil is, well, an interesting way to make your case.
I think the kindest way to interpret McTaggart’s use of VAERS data and the deaths in India involves assuming that she was unaware of both the nature of the information in the VAERS database and the fact that many of the deaths reported following administration of the vaccine have actually been clearly and unambiguously unrelated to the vaccine. I know of no deaths that have been attributed to the vaccine after investigation.
If people’s decisions on healthcare are being influenced by magazines such as WDDTY, then these magazines have a duty to be very, very careful not to inadvertently mislead anybody on topics such as HPV vaccination. I think they need to be rather more careful than they currently are.
More
I’ve just typed around 600 words arguing against a fragment of a sentence. There is so much wrong with the HPV article and the magazine as a whole that to address it all would take an age. Here are just a few further (brief) comments on some of the problems with WDDTY.
In the HPV article, there is a boxout on page 30 that is headed “first invent the problem”. Lynne McTaggart might not think that cervical cancer is the most serious or the most common problem women face, but it’s certainly not been invented by the vaccine manufacturers. Hundreds of women die each year in the UK from cervical cancer. In the US, there are thousands of deaths.
On page 35, McTaggart points out that HPV expert Dr Diane Harper has distanced herself from Merck’s marketing tactics. She fails to mention Harper’s views on the vaccine itself. Fortunately, Ben Goldacre did, in 2009. “I fully support the HPV vaccines,” she says. “I believe that in general they are safe in most women. I told the Express all of this.”
I’ve only looked at the HPV article, but I think it would be a mistake to assume that the rest of the magazine is any better. JQH points out that the research on vitamin D that is discussed is not as clear-cut as WDDTY would have you believe. He also points out that there is a recommendation in one article to take Ginkgo Biloba, but no mention is made of potential side-effects of this remedy.
Claims Of Unethical Skeptics: A Mirror Image Of The Truth
Over the years, I have seen a number of baseless claims made by anti-vaccinationists and advocates of alternative medicine regarding unethical behaviour by skeptics. They imagine conspiracies and financial interests. They make claims that their opponents are dishonest and mislead people. Yet there never seems to be any evidence that the skeptics they smear have done anything unethical.There is evidence, though, that some anti-vaccinationists and advocates of alternative medicine have been involved in unethical behaviour. Read the rest of this entry »
Dr Richard Halvorsen, Babyjabs, and Single Vaccines: Misleading Advertising, Exaggeration, Harm & Offence
Dr Richard Halvorsen is the founder of Babyjabs, a clinic that offers single vaccines and baseless scaremongering about the MMR vaccine. I took a look at some of the claims on the Babyjabs website and submitted a complaint to the ASA. Read the rest of this entry »
Wakefield Case Against Deer, Godlee & BMJ Dismissed
It has been reported that Andrew Wakefield’s case against Fiona Godlee, Brian Deer and the BMJ has been thrown out. The Statesman has this: “In a one-paragraph order, Travis County District Judge Amy Clark Meachum said Texas courts don’t have jurisdiction over the parties Wakefield sued. She tossed out the case.” Read the rest of this entry »
Vaccination Council: Misleading
Vaccination is one of medicine’s great success stories, preventing deaths and serious ill health caused by infectious diseases – and almost always doing so without causing serious harm in the process. I will be discussing the lives saved and harm prevented by vaccination against diseases such as pertussis and measles in this post, but first a note on safety. As Rümke and Visser wrote: “During recent years a scala of diseases or symptoms have been associated with vaccination (presumed side effects). Careful and extensive investigations have shown that such hypotheses could not be supported. [...] The total number of cases where at least a possible relation between side effects and vaccination is observed–apart from local reactions and moderate general symptoms–is very rare (about 0.25 per 1000 vaccinations) and does not balance the benefits from vaccination.” Not everyone accepts that vaccination is safe and effective. Sadly, some of these people mislead others into thinking that vaccination is less effective or more dangerous than it actually is. Read the rest of this entry »
Daily Mail Science Correspondent on Vaccination
The Daily Mail have this week published an article on the HPV vaccine. Remarkably, it’s actually quite good. Certainly better than those written by Rachel Porter, Paul Sims, and the anonymous (and ubiquitous) Daily Mail Reporter. (See here, here, here, and here for my thoughts on those articles.) The journalist in question is Fiona MacRae. The article is about girls being denied the “life-saving cervical cancer jab” because of the religious objections of schools. As I say, it’s actually quite good. The only quibble I have is that it includes the following sentence: Read the rest of this entry »
