Wednesday, March 7, 2012

There is no "Devil" in "Vaccine"

This video cites Andrew Wakefield (who you should all be familiar with by now) as a reputable source.

Now, that should be more than enough condemning evidence for me to go off of, but it's really SO big that I'm not going to bother with it for a bit. Honestly, there's a lot of stupid you can pack into a video 8 minutes long (like this one)- lots of claims, few citations. The video mentions cases of multiple girls that have taken the vaccine and experienced symptoms such as seizures, severe abdominal pain, wart outbreaks, paralysis, and fainting spells. They say there were 18 deaths, nearly 4.5 of which due to "blood clots" (by the way, the 4.5 comes from the language in the video, saying "nearly a quarter cited blood clots"). However, the video is titled: "HPV Gardasil Vaccine Proves Lethal - 47 Girls Now Dead". There is mention of one more death, in total, that I could find, bringing the number of alleged deaths up to 19. Although that 18 could have come from just one study (in fact, I believe it did), the video is obligated to mention the source for what otherwise just looks like a wild exaggeration.

That's pretty far from 47 in my book, but I'll chalk that poor bit of math up to the same reason the creator of the video uses Andrew Wakefield (notice the lack of a doctorate- for good reason) as a credible source to back up their point.

To sum it up, this video is chock full of anecdotal evidence, accusations, and exaggerations; all of which it claims are fact-based and rational arguments. Unfortunately, some people still believe that the plural of "anecdote" is "data".

1 comment:

  1. I've noticed the exaggeration and anecdotal-based reasoning comes up a lot in studies trying to link autism to vaccines.

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