

Bill Gates: Vaccine-autism link 'an absolute lie' - dclaysmith
http://edition.cnn.com/2011/HEALTH/02/03/gupta.gates.vaccines.world.health/

======
fat_tony
Relativism is destroying our society. There are things that are not up for
debate. They usually involve facts and science. Inoculation is one of them.

I think vaccines should be mandatory for all children. If you don't vaccine
your kid, CPS should take the kid away after multiple warnings, because you
are an unfit parent and a danger to our community otherwise.

~~~
ghshephard
There is relatively good science that demonstrates, in a well vaccinated
population, that you are endangering your child's life by having them
vaccinated for some diseases.

Vaccinations aren't without risk (though, clearly, autism is not one of those
risks)- and, as long as all the other parents get their children vaccinated,
your child can take a pass on some vaccines and come out ahead from a
mortality perspective.

With that said, from a _societal_ perspective, it's imperative that parent's
put their child's life at this (minor) risk so that the overall mortality rate
goes down.

Don't be so quick to judge the parent as "unfit", though your comment about
being a danger to the community does, in fact, hold.

And, perhaps we should be a little less quick to suggest the solution to other
parents not doing what we want them to do is to have "CPS take the kids away
after multiple warnings."

There is a cost to freedom, and sometimes it means that we have to let parents
makes the call on these grey areas, even if it offends our own personal
rational models of how the world should work. Vaccines are clearly not as cut
and dry as something like a life-saving blood transfusion or surgery for
appendicitis, in which I would suggest that there is an imperative to over-
rule the parent should they decline treatment of their children.

~~~
Retric
Unfortunately, we don't currently bring up the parents of children who die
from lack of vaccination on negligent homicide charges in large part because
of your line of reasoning. Parents are in no way equipped to make informed
decisions about vaccination, and giving them the option is a horribly bad
idea.

Globally there is a huge unvaccinated population
[http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1272/is_2729_134/ai_n...](http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1272/is_2729_134/ai_n26912296/)
all it takes is one passenger to bring something back and suddenly you end up
with a large number of dead children.
[http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1291987...](http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129198775&ps=cprs)

PS: Because it's often local doctors that accept this Anti-Vaccination
bullshit small locations often lose their herd immunity. It's one thing to
randomly replace 1/100,000 vaccinations with an inert substance it's another
for 10+% of the children in a small area to avoid vaccination.

~~~
Opie_taylor
If vaccination really works, then it's only the unvaccinated that will be
affected.

~~~
Retric
People are not vaccinated at birth, so even with 100% effective vaccination
really young children are still at risk. However, the reality is vaccinations
while effective are not perfect so there is are range protection. AKA, Some
poeple while at lower risk of infection can still get sick with prolonged
exposure.

PS: A fire resistant couch save lives dispute the fact they can still burn in
a hot enough fire, the benefit is focused on small ignition sources aka a
spark or cigarette not a kiln.

~~~
drstrangevibes
right so we vaccinate even though theres a low chance of contracting a
disease, a significant chance that the vaccination will cause side effects and
a chance that it might not work anyway. Makes sense to me!

~~~
Retric
_low chance of contracting a disease_

EX: Just the M in MMR prevents ~1/2 million people from getting sick each and
every year. _The benefit of measles vaccination in preventing illness,
disability, and death has been well-documented. The first 20 years of licensed
measles vaccination in the U.S. prevented an estimated 52 million cases of the
disease, 17,400 cases of mental retardation, and 5,200 deaths.[10] During
1999–2004, a strategy led by the World Health Organization and UNICEF led to
improvements in measles vaccination coverage that averted an estimated 1.4
million measles deaths worldwide.[11]_

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Measles_US_1944-2007_inset...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Measles_US_1944-2007_inset.png)

Vaccinations prevent well over 50,000 deaths per year in the US alone along
with a large number of vary serious side effects. On an individual basis the
lifetime chance of infection is still higher than you might think and only
increases as more people avoid vaccination. If we where talking about an adult
taking the risks for themselves that's one things, but we are talking about
making the choice for someone else as well increasing the overall risk to
society.

------
yankcrime
Better coming from someone with an ever-so-slightly more relevant background,
such as Ben Goldacre: <http://www.badscience.net/2008/08/the-medias-mmr-hoax/>

I encourage everyone to read his book - it's fascinating, enlightening,
entertaining and rage-inducing all at the same time.

The media-at-large needs more people like him.

~~~
nkurz
Goldacre is great, but don't disparage Gates as not having a relevant
background. He's a really smart guy, has been involved in vaccination efforts
for a long time, is known for trying to spend money effectively, and has
pledged to spend $10 Billion dollars on childrens' vaccinations in the next
decade. He's being quoted here as an expert and not a celebrity.

------
parenthesis
A public backlash against vaccination is nothing new. The introduction of
compulsory smallpox vaccination in Britain in 1853 was controversial and
protested against:

[http://timelines.tv/index.php?t=3&e=10](http://timelines.tv/index.php?t=3&e=10)

~~~
nika
Because anyone concerned about the safety of something being forced on the
population is an anti-science religious zealot, right?

Seriously, that's what this whole thread is about. If you are worried about
whether vaccines are safe, then you want to "kill children".

I think the burden of proof is on those who want to force everyone to be
vaccinated to prove that none of these vaccines will ever kill a child.

~~~
ugh
1\. Scientists have thoroughly looked into and still look into the safety of
vaccines. The dubious autism connection, for example, was extensively
researched. Nobody ever believed that the safety of vaccines is not important
and doesn’t have to be tested.

3\. As long as a vaccine kills less children than the disease it prevents, it
is already preferable to the disease, there is no need to even prove that
vaccines kill absolutely no one. A one percent likelihood of death is
obviously preferable to a ten percent likelihood of death. (Numbers for
illustrative purposes only.) All the evidence we have tells us that vaccines
are perfectly safe — but even if they weren’t, they don’t automatically become
useless.

I don’t think anyone has anything against being worried. Being oblivious to
evidence and spreading lies kills children, not being worried.

~~~
jaredmck
If the vaccine definitively will prevent/end the disease, it may be worth it;
but you seem to be ignoring the fact that most of these situations are far
from binary.

~~~
ugh
Where did I say that the situation was binary? Vaccines obviously don’t have
to be 100 percent effective and they can kill kids and still be worth it. (A
0.5 percent chance of dying from the vaccine and a 0.5 percent chance of dying
from the disease is obviously better than a 10 percent chance of dying from
the disease. Numbers for illustrative purposes only.)

Oh, and in the case of, for example, smallpox the situation was actually
binary. As late as 1959 two million people were dying from smallpox every year
and millions more contracted the disease every year. There have been no deaths
from smallpox since 1978, it has been completely eradicated.

The smallpox vaccine saves millions of lives every year.

~~~
Opie_taylor
That would depend on your chances of contracting the disease. If there were 0%
chance of you contracting the disease, then there would be a disincentive to
take the vaccine- it would actually raise your chances of dying.

~~~
ugh
Am I really so hard to understand? I’m a bit insulted that you would really
think that I’m that stupid.

The 10 percent in my completely hypothetical example were obviously already
factoring in the chance of getting the disease in the first place, otherwise
the comparison wouldn’t even begin to make sense.

Today one problem is obviously that herd immunity protects individual
defectors. The chances of getting measles even without being vaccinated are
relatively low when everyone around you is vaccinated. I would have less of a
problem with people who freely admit that they don’t want to vaccinate because
they are selfish gits. That’s not the argument they are making, though (it
also wouldn’t scale), they think that no one should vaccinate and if that were
the case massively more people would die from measles and other preventable
diseases. (We have already seen that herd immunity can be seriously
compromised in places where many parents don’t vaccinate.)

------
sambeau
Dr. Andrew Wakefield should be in prison for fraud. Why isn't he?

~~~
random42
< pedantic > Wakefield was struck off the Medical Register in May 2010, and
cannot practise medicine in the UK </pedantic >

(Genuine query )Should he still be addressed as _Dr._?

~~~
tel
Typically, you're eligible to use that title after receiving the degree. I
know a number of non-practicing people who have degrees and sometimes (rarely,
really) use the Dr. It's still a term of respect for completing a demanding
program.

Of course, with Wakefield it's difficult to still muster such respect.

------
techdmn
One point I like to make when this topic comes up- Yes, it's unfortunate that
people believe bad science linking vaccines to autism. That said, I think it
is a symptom (at least in the U.S.) of people having very little faith in the
F.D.A. or other government agencies responsible for consumer protection.

~~~
MoreMoschops
Which is in itself bizarre. It's as if theses government agencies have been
too successful for their own good, and now people have stopped believing in
the dangers.

Smallpox - eradicated from the face of the earth (barring lab samples).

Polio - only 50 years ago, there were tens of thousands of cases in the U.S.
Ten years later, after a serious vaccination push, it was down to a bit over a
hundred cases. 1979 - last indigenous Polio transmission in the U.S.
(globally, it just won't die, in large part thanks to the efforts of religious
fruit-loops convincing people it's a plot by the U.S. to sterilise them; we
pushed it more or less down to a single country, and now heart-breakingly it's
spreading from there again).

Whooping cough - beaten down from tens of thousands of deaths to dozens in the
U.S., and then cases started rising again when people stopped having their
children vaccinated at the start of the 21st century.

The list of diseases that no longer present a real daily threat to people goes
on and on. Let's have someone big from the relevant government agency on the
news telling people that they're killing children by dodging vaccinations.

~~~
Alex3917
"It's as if theses government agencies have been too successful for their own
good, and now people have stopped believing in the dangers."

Of course you're conveniently leaving out all of the people who have died from
FDA wrongdoing, and government wrongdoing in general.

The fact is that around 1 in 3 Americans die from drug use or drug-related
causes. When you put it that way it doesn't sound like the FDA is such a
trustworthy agency, does it?

~~~
natnat
Most of the people who die from drugs are either abusing the drugs or taking
drugs that are necessary to keep them alive. Chemotherapy kills a lot of
people, simply because the whole purpose of it is to kill a tumor with
poisons. Does that mean that chemo should be banned? Of course not, because
people who take chemo drugs are probably going to die if nothing is done.

Likewise, opiates kill a lot of people. But how many people would forgo life-
saving surgery because of the pain they would have to live with after the
surgery if effective painkillers were illegal? My guess is a lot more than the
number of people who are killed by opiates directly.

The duty of the FDA is to make sure that drugs are safe and effective. If
they're overpermissive, more people will die of drugs themselves. If they're
too restrictive, people won't get the medicine they need to stay alive. It's a
tricky balance to strike, and I think the FDA is doing a reasonably good job.

~~~
Alex3917
"Most of the people who die from drugs are either abusing the drugs or taking
drugs that are necessary to keep them alive."

People dying from drug abuse is largely the government's fault, and relatively
few people die from taking drugs that are medically necessary.

~~~
natnat
How do you know that few people die from medically necessary drugs? I've been
looking for a source of number of deaths by drug, but I can't find one.

Also, I'm fairly confident that drugs being illegal causes fewer people to die
from drug use directly.[1] Drug illegality makes drugs more expensive, which
makes it more difficult for the average junkie to obtain a lethal dose.

Another big issue is medical errors. This isn't a government problem so much
as it's a problem with our health care system. I'm not really sure whether
government-run healthcare would improve this (by removing the profit motive to
see as many patients as possible) or make it worse, by creating the wrong
incentives.

It's really easy to blame the government for everyone's problems, but
government regulation often saves lives, even if it ends up indirectly killing
some people. For example, if the FDA kills people by prohibiting a potentially
life-saving drug for safety reasons, they look really bad. But you don't see
the people whose lives were saved because they didn't take a drug that turned
out to be severe latent carcinogens.

[1] Of course, drugs being illegal makes more people die from drug-related
violence. Violence is probably a worse problem, even if it's less deadly than
overdosing, because it can affect nonusers.

------
Getahobby
Gee, I just don't know who to believe - Jenny McCarthy or billg.

~~~
MoreMoschops
Fortunately, you can go to the source data on this one and come to your own
conclusions.

"And so the people who go and engage in those anti-vaccine efforts -- you
know, they, they kill children." BillG certainly has. It's refreshing to see
someone big just say it so clearly.

~~~
dhimes
I think he left off the SARCASM signal on his post.

~~~
MoreMoschops
Believing BillG on it when you could just do your own review of the data is as
foolish as believing JennyM. Being successful in one technical field does not
make you a medical expert. Look at Howard Hughes, for example.

~~~
shadowfox
> Being successful in one technical field does not make you a medical expert

Doesn't that hold for every one of us as well?

~~~
MoreMoschops
[sarcasm]No, if you're a hacker you're an expert in everything.[/sarcasm]

Of course it holds, what point are you making?

------
michaelcampbell
While I believe in the science that has shown no link between autism and
vaccines, of what importance is Bill Gates saying so? He's not an authority on
the subject; it (should) carry no more weight than Jenny McCarthy saying there
is a link.

------
adammichaelc
Gates seems to imply in the first paragraph that vaccinating children will
somehow lead to population control. He made the same connection in a TED talk.
I don't see the link. Does anybody know what he's referring to?

~~~
m0nastic
I assumed he was referring to the idea of families in areas with higher rates
of infant mortality and childhood disease having more kids to perpetuate their
families.

If kids are less likely to die, then in theory, parents don't need to have as
large a family in order to ensure that some survive.

~~~
adammichaelc
Interesting. I always thought that people stopped having large families mostly
due to the economic reasons. ie In an agrarian society more kids = more wealth
because they can work on the farm and so on, whereas in an industrialized
society more kids = less wealth because they mostly eat up resources for 2
decades or more.

~~~
MichaelSalib
I don't think your analysis is correct: in general, most families in the
agrarian developing world do not have a surplus of land, so larger families
are not helpful....

~~~
ceejayoz
Even a small amount of land is labour intensive when you're farming it by
hand.

------
euroclydon
There is a long and documented history of governments and other organizations
abusing their power by performing unconsented tests on people under the
auspice of a vaccine, which lends credence to people's skepticism.

~~~
natnat
There is also a long and documented history of people dying from preventable
diseases. A history that, for many diseases, abruptly ended when governments
began mandating vaccines.

Perhaps the threat of the government somehow secretly administering mind
control drugs or whatever into everyone's vaccines is a little less likely
than dying of polio if we stopped taking vaccines.

------
seattlefrnd12
Gates most recent annual letter is a great read if anyone hasn't seen it yet

~~~
random42
Can you please put a link here?

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iterationx
Bill Gates: We can lower the population through vaccines and medicine. Minute
4:42 <http://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates.html>

Not really the go to guy for vaccine info.

~~~
sorbus
The actual quote: "Now, if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health
care, reproductive health services, we could lower [the population] by,
perhaps, 10 or 15 percent."

You can read that to mean that he wants to kill people off using vaccines,
health care, and reproductive health services, I suppose. I would read it as
meaning that he believes that if quality of life increases, making it less
likely for an individual to die due to preventable disease or injury, people
will have fewer children.

~~~
Opie_taylor
Maybe he just wants to sterilize them with the vaccines?

Wow - that was an incredibly dumb thing for him to say, given some of the
third world's beliefs about vaccination.

------
cgcardona
What he says from 1:15-1:35 is a bit extreme IMO. :-/

------
drstrangevibes
anything which prolongs life increases population growth any other argument is
absurd, yes I know the theory that populations with high infant mortality have
more children, but surely the infant mortality acts as a population regulating
factor, and besides large populations with a high decay will always eventually
be taken over by lower populations where fertile couples are living longer!

------
drstrangevibes
0:30 the goal for bill gates? reducing population growth?!!

~~~
ugh
People get less children when less of their kids die, slowing down population
growth.

~~~
NxguiGui
1-1+1 = 1. Population growth?

------
nxgui4
Why nobody listens. Why is so important to "reduce population growt"? Gates
clearly stated that (look in transcript of the interview on cnn). Am i crazy?
Why packard foundation also is big on this? Why this elites make decisions for
all of you?
[http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=...](http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=packard+foundation+reducing+popilation+growt&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8#hl=en&safe=off&client=safari&rls=en&sa=X&ei=w3xNTY-
MEcnGswayn9WSDQ&ved=0CBUQvwUoAQ&q=packard+foundation+reducing+population+growth&spell=1&fp=2624d7abe4c4bc0c)

~~~
ceejayoz
High levels of population growth are unsustainable. There's a finite amount of
land and other resources on the planet, and we've seen world population go
from a billion in 1800 to about seven billion now. That level of growth cannot
continue without triggering wars, famines, etc., and slowing it is a pretty
admirable goal.

Infant mortality and subsistence farming in the developing world is one of the
big causes for it. Raise the quality of living, prevent babies from dying, and
people suddenly don't need to have 20 kids to subsistence farm a plot of
desert.

It's only counterintuitive if you don't examine it closely.

