This is a report about a debate at Freedom Fest in Las Vegas about 10 days ago.
Let me preface:
This forum, particularly this sub-forum us deeply infected with anti-science nonsense.
I am a scientific skeptic and have been all my life. It's time one of us stood up to a lot of this crap, particularly the anti-vaccination idiocy.
I believe in the non-aggression principle. If you don't vaccinate your kids, you are helping the viruses propagate, mutate and you may cause harm to MY kids. Vaccines will NOT hurt your kids. You're wrong about that.
To disregard the incredible gains that science and particularly medical science have made over the last century is to live life like a blind man in a strip club.
It's time you Anti-Vaxers look at the way things really are.
Most REAL scientists and doctors don't have time to deal with all the pseudo-science that's out there. So you Anti-Vaxers are free to spew your nonsense at various controlled events, with sympathetic audiences.
But this time my favorite medical professional, Steven Novella (a clinical neurologist, professor and Director of Neurology at Yale) happened to be in town! Novella also runs the most popular scientific podcast: "The Skeptics Guide to the Universe", which I have listened to every week for the last 5 years.
Novella took off his conference to go debate an Anti-Vaxer, Dr. Whitaker (who is a big fan of cancer quack Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski). Note that Novella did not even know the debate opponent prior to the debate.
He's how it rolled! (Please take the time to read this and for those of you on my side, you will savor every moment)
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/...t-freedomfest/
Some juicy excerpts:
How it came to be:
"I turns out that the event was FreedomFest, a right-wing/Libertarian confab that happened to be going on at the same time as TAM up the road a piece on the Strip at Bally’s. Steve didn’t know who the antivaccinationist was going to be either, which made me marvel at him. I don’t know that I’d have the confidence agree to walk into the lion’s den with less than a day’s notice not even knowing who my opponent is. Steve was more than happy to invite me along. Clearly, this was was an opportunity that I couldn’t resist. So we met up with Michael Shermer, and it was from him that I learned that Steve’s opponent was to be Dr. Julian Whitaker."
BTW, I'm pals with Michael Shermer. I've known him for 15 years and we meet about every month at his Skeptic lectures.
"To my surprise, neither Steve nor Michael knew who Dr. Whitaker was. Being more than happy to give them some background on Dr. Whitaker, I told them. Regular readers here might remember that I’ve mentioned Dr. Whitaker before. First off, he’s a big fan of Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski, serving as the primary pro-Burzynski medical “expert” in that propagandistic paean to the brave maverick doctor, Burzynski. (movie from Burzynski at the link above)"
"Dr. Whitaker is also big among the “alternative medicine” crowd for his claims to be able to cure diabetes “naturally,” without food or drugs (of course!). In doing so, he claims that metformin doesn’t work, antibiotics don’t work (because, apparently, they don’t succeed in saving every diabetic foot) and that, in general, conventional medicine doesn’t work. At his Wellness Center, he treats patients with diabetes and heart disease with acupuncture, nutritional supplements, diet, hyperbaric oxygen, chelation therapy, and a wide variety of other questionable therapies. (Hyperbaric oxygen could work for diabetic feet, but chelation therapy is useless and dangerous and acupuncture is nothing more than placebo medicine)."
"[They were] passing out a newsletter, Dr. Whitaker’s Health & Healing: Your Definitive Guide to Wellness Medicine. It was the September 2011 issue, and, emblazoned across the page was a large headline Vaccinations: The Destruction of Our Country. This does not bode well, I thought, as I thumbed through the newsletter, which packed pretty much every major antivaccine trope into a single article.
"Dr. Whitaker started out with what was essentially the same old tropes, including confusing correlation with causation, harping about how autism prevalence has appeared to skyrocket since the 1980s and 1990s. He made the claim that almost no child was developmentally disabled 30 years ago but now one in 88 children are diagnosed as having an autism spectrum disorder. During this segment, he also went on about how chronic diseases are skyrocketing along with autism and that it must be the evil vaccines. OK, I added the “evil” part, but it was quite clear that Dr. Whitaker thinks that they are evil. He made that very clear."
"This was just the warmup. Steve, as you might imagine, easily demolished these arguments, pointing out that correlation does not equal causation. He also discussed how there have been several very large studies that controlled for relevant variables have failed to find even (as I like to put it) even a whiff of a hint of a correlation between vaccination and either autism prevalence or onset. He discussed how we as humans are hard-wired to infer causation from observed correlation, which makes it very understandable that people mistakenly conclude that vaccines cause autism? Why? Because, as we’ve discussed time and time again here, autism is often diagnosed in the age range when children receive a lot of vaccines, which means that by random chance alone we will often see diagnoses made in close temporal proximity to a round of vaccinations. Moreover, it was easy for Steve to point out that diagnostic criteria were broadened in the early 1990s, that schools started screening for autism, and that schools also got funding from the government to help autistic students. Again, Dr. Whitaker’s arguments were softball pitches, easily hit out of the ballpark as Prince Fielder hit balls out of the ballpark three days earlier in the pre-Allstar Game Home Run Derby. In essence, Dr. Whitaker made the same sort of ignorant arguments that Dr. Jay Gordon regularly makes, as exemplified in the comments after this excellent post by Emily Willingham why the “autism epidemic” is no epidemic at all."
"It was at this point that Dr. Whitaker lived up to the name of Penn Jillette’s Friday night party at TAM: He brought the stupid. Oh, man, did he bring the stupid! I’m sorry. I know that we’re not supposed to be quite so harsh here on SBM, but it’s been a long time since I’ve seen such a glaring example of mathematic, statistical, and scientific illiteracy. First, he stated unequivocally that he thought that vaccines were the primary cause of autism, scoffing at the idea that it was primarily genetic in nature or that vaccines were not causing it. As bad as that was, worse was to come, and it did when Dr. Whitaker showed this graph (sorry for the poor quality; the room was dark and all I had was my iPhone):"
I want you to sit back for a minute and drink in the utter silliness of this graph, the utter lack of science, the utter nonsense. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen its like. I’m sure many of you can figure out what’s wrong with it on your own, but my duty as blogger demands that I explain, and I’ll give it exactly the time it deserves. Take a look. Notice how Dr. Whitaker extrapolates from a small dataset to produce curves that go right up to 100/100, or 100%. Steve’s jaw (and mine and, I daresay, Michael Shermer’s jaws) dropped in astonishment. That’s right. Dr. Whitaker produced a graph that predicted that by the year 2032 all boys will be diagnosed with an ASD and that by 2041 all girls will also have autism. I kid you not. Lest you think that this wasn’t Dr. Whitaker’s intention, that he didn’t know the implications of his extrapolation, I will quote from the relevant section of Dr. Whitaker’s newsletter discussing the graph:
"To cap it off, Dr. Whitaker scaled the Y-axis to go up to 120. This was so bad that I almost felt sorry for Dr. Whitaker. When Dr. Novella explained why these graphs were so silly, the audience “got it” instantly, and it was at that point that Dr. Whitaker began to lose the audience."
"We didn’t pull any punches, either, asking where he got the data, how he generated the data, what mathematical model he used to produce the graph, how he fitted the curve, how he could justify extrapolating so far from such a limited data set, how he decided what curve to fit, and how he can justify a curve that goes to 100% when there is virtually no condition that 100% of the population will suffer from except for (eventually) death. His answers were—shall we say?—not exactly convincing. "
" It was actually rather painful to watch, in the way that it’s painful to watch one baseball team get pummeled by 12 runs, even when it’s a baseball team I really detest, like the New York Yankees. However, there was no “mercy rule” in debate. Basically, Dr. Whitaker trotted out a number of antivaccine “greatest hits,” and Steve pummeled him for it. For instance, Dr. Whitaker showed this graph:
"Yes, this graph is yet another example of one of the oldest and most deceptive antivaccine tropes, one that I like to call the “vaccines didn’t save us” gambit. Basically, this intellectually dishonest—downright deceptive, actually—tactic involves pointing out that mortality was falling from a given infectious disease before a vaccine for it was introduced. In this case, it was measles and a few other diseases. The implication that antivaccinationists want people to draw is that hygiene, sanitation, and the like were the “real” causes of the decrease. The long version of the rebuttal this gambit is here. The short version is that disease incidence does not equal mortality and that measles incidence plummeted after the introduction of the vaccine. The reason mortality was falling before the vaccine was for other reasons. Medical care was getting better, and a smaller percentage of people who got the disease died from it."
"I will finish by pointing out that it’s one thing for an antivaccine “party” like the Canary Party to link up with a local Tea Party organization, as Kent Heckenlively crowed about recently. It’s quite another thing when a national meeting in which many of the luminaries of conservatism, libertarianism, and the Tea Party movement go to pow-wow together allows such rank antivaccine nonsense a prominent place in its program, complete with a pseudo-”debate” and two screenings of a movie that is nothing more than rank antivaccine propaganda disguised as a “tell both sides”-style “balanced” documentary."
Read the rest at the link:
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/...t-freedomfest/
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Originally Posted by Revolution9
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