Lies, misrepresentation, and abuse

With the absence of any good news for the anti-vaccinators, the JABS crowd have gone back to their favourite hobbies: being abusive, misrepresenting data and doling out dangerous medical advice and misinformation.

First of all comes a new poster by the name of "catrin-m", who posts a link to the comments on a BBC piece about vaccines (not the piece itself, just the comments), and asks what the JABS regulars think about it. Sounds like a sock puppet to me, designed to give the ranters something to shout about. Sure enough, the king of incoherence, Gus the Fuss pipes up with a link to Clifford Miller and John Stone's blog, Childhealthsafety (oh, the irony). He then quotes from the site;

This is the data the drug industry do not want you to see. Here 2 centuries of UK, USA and Australian official death statistics show conclusively and scientifically modern medicine is not responsible for and played little part in substantially improved life expectancy and survival from disease in western economies.

All this is is the tired old graphs about mortality rates, the graphs that purport to show that measles would have died out without vaccines. Which is bollocks. Over the last hundred years or so - the period that Miller's graphs cover - standards of nutrition have gone up, hygiene has improved, and the standard of medical care has improved massively. Of course mortality rates were on the way down. Miller extends the rather vague "best fit" line to "demonstrate" that measles would have died out anyway. The trouble is, he doesn't show the incidence rate. This is perhaps a little more informative:

Measles incidence, showing quite clearly where the vaccine has (or had, until the anti-vax lobby decided to start trying to kill children) pretty much wiped measles out.

No-one is arguing that in "Western" countries, the consequences of catching measles aren't as dire as they once were - better health care, better nourished (generally) kids means a far lower percentage of kids actually die from the disease - but without the vaccine, the number of kids catching the disease would be so much higher, and hence the number of deaths proportionately highter.

Why Gus the Fuss, Clifford "Twat" Miller and John "Cock" Stone can't see that is beyond me. It's basic maths. (Actually, it's not beyond me. The reason's perfectly clear - between them they don't have the intelligence to win a battle of wits with a dandelion.)

John Scudamore (owner of Whale.To, pig farmer, and self-confessed receiver of arse burns through sitting on a ley line) then chimes in with pretty much the same argument, but, as is his style, endlessly quoting his own website and assorted discredited "Experts", especially the late Robert Mendelsohn. He cites conspiracy;

usual BBC propaganda, like the Times, along with most of the comments, never managed to get anyting onto BBC comment section yet.

(Yes John, that's because you're fucking mental)

In a subsequent post, Scudamore cites that proven liar Hilary Butler:

"Take the 1991 measles epidemic. They calculated that this epidemic costs the country 8 million dollars to treat the 9,000 plus cases. I'm not sure about that figure, but the FACT that over 60% of those children were appropriately vaccinated was never taken into consideration in that calculation."

Hilary Butler's another one with a poor grasp of maths - or a good grasp of maths, but uses it to misrepresent statistics in order to back up her argument that vaccines don't work.

If you have a population of (say) one million, 95% of whom are vaccinated with a vaccine that prevents infection 95% of the time, and lets say that a disease will infect 50% of non-vaccinated people, if the whole population are exposed to the disease, then:

50,000 non vaccinated people - 25,000 will get the disease.
950,000 vaccinated people - 47,500 will get the disease.

So, yes, in this simple example, 65% of those who got the disease were vaccinated.

If no-one had been vaccinated, around half a million would have caught the disease. You're an evil witch (and a liar) Butler.

Finally, John Stone weighs in:

I think Finn's piece was offensively patronising. A miscalculation which shows a shoddy intellect.

All I have to say about that is "Pot, kettle, cunt."