When I went to make a subject, I was suddenly filled with Duran Duran’s Notorious. I’m sorry. There is no call for that.
I found this really interesting after last night having a conversation with a friend who seemed to me to be absolutely certain that flu shots cause dystonia. She commented on the FaceBook reposting of my sarcastic article about bringing pack polio.
It’s frustrating, because there’s just no teeth to this issue but because it appeared on some local news affiliate and got passed around the Internet by anti-vaxxers and the confused and emotional souls, suddenly it’s absolute truth. Well, it’s not. And Orac made a great post over at Respectful Insolence about how the Desiree Jennings reaction may have been found in the VAERS database. Oh, for those who aren’t familiar, that stands for the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, a national database for monitoring all adverse reactions that come from vaccination from the fine folks at the CDC and the FDA. Want to learn more? Click here for the VAERS web site.
It certainly seems more and more like the allegations of dystonia are completely baseless. More importantly, this just continues to be one of those things that causes me to repeat myself ad nauseum. The words I am repeating? CORRELATION DOES NOT IMPLY CAUSATION.
I think I’m going to set up a macro on my computer so that every time I hit F6, it spits that phrase out. I cannot count the number of times I’ve had to explain this simple fact to people. On Monday I had an email from my friend Kristin, and by Monday night I had come down with the first signs of H1N1. That hardly means she emailed me the virus. Just because two events happen in close proximity does NOT mean that one caused the other.
This woman is probably not a liar. She is probably very much of the opinion that her flu shot caused these horrible symptoms. That doesn’t mean it’s true. People can believe a lot of things that aren’t true. And the fact that she both doesn’t have dystonia and that her condition wasn’t caused by a flu shot doesn’t make her condition any less sad. I’m not insulting her when I say this, I’m just stunned at the lack of rational thought exhibited by friends of mine.
So please, ladies and gentlemen. Use your noodles. Don’t just question authority (oi! oi!), question everything.
Jim
“Correlation does not imply causation.”
This statement also applies to Pro-Vaxxers. I’m not deriding vaccine shots: however just because you get a shot and don’t get sick doesn’t mean that the vaccine works. It only means you didn’t get sick. Way too many organizations manipulate that to pad their statistics when it’s actually a false assumption.
Remember:don’t just question authority, question everything.
There’s no question that stats are skewed no matter what. However, the dearth of information from the product testing shows that people who were vaccinated were grossly unlikely to get sick from the virus they were exposed to. Those numbers are what we rely on. The studies are published and peer-reviewed and stand on their own two feet. That’s the difference between good data and manipulated data, when the outsiders validate your findings you know you’re on to something.
…and really, that’s the best way to question things, to show people how you did them, allow them to duplicate and prove your findings.
Someone once told me that peer review was flawed because usually all of the peers just want to follow along, or are in someone’s pocket. I guess he’d never met anyone with a genuine scientific passion.
