On running anti-vaccination nonsense out of the Party

As I wrote in my last column, that meeting of the Travis County Republican Party last month was entertaining and enlightening, though not for the reasons that every speaker might have hoped. Talking publicly, I noted, is a good way of cajoling your friends in the silent majority into collective action. Leaving an open microphones with one faction too long can have a different effect, and one that we need to correct.

In addition to the gold standard diatribe—with that surreal moment in which one of the anarcho-libertarians started reading in Maoist fashion from some book by Ron Paul—we also suffered through a 20 minute lecture on the dangers of widespread vaccination. This was the report, it was characterized, of the coalitions committee, which was trying to forge alliances with a number of anti-vaccination groups. Most of the report was a recitation of the two-page backgrounder on the topic (which I’m not reproducing here in full only because I don’t have an electronic copy). The whole episode led to the lodging of a point of order, as at least one of us assembled had the sense that we were listening to recycled John Birch Society propaganda from the 1950s.

But rather than just name-calling, I should get to the substance of the backgrounder. The intellectual case for the assault on widespread vaccination programs rested on four “Select References from the Peer-Reviewed Medical Research Literature,” which I’ve slightly reformatted here for readability and consistency:

• Russell L. Blaylock (2008a), “The Truth Behind the Vaccine Cover-up,” Medical Veritas 5, pp. 1714-1726
• Russell L. Blaylock (2008b), “Review. The danger of excessive vaccination during brain development: the case for a link to Austism Spectrum Disorders (ASD),” Medical Veritas 5, pp. 1727-1741.
• M.S. Petrik, M.C. Wong, R.C. Tabata, R.F. Garry, and C.A. Shaw, “Aluminum adjuvant linked to Gulf War illness induces motor neuton death in mice,” Neuromolecular Medicine 9(1), pp. 83-100
• Russell L. Blaylock (2003), “Interaction of Cytokines, Excitotoxins, and Reactive Nitrogen and Oxygen Species in Austism Spectrum Disorders,” Journal of the American Nutraceutical Association 6(4), pp. 15-32

Ah, The Truth—it’s out there, Scully, is it not? We should immediately wonder about any journal named Medical Veritas. We should also immediately be concerned that most of the case is based on the writings of one Russell L. Blaylock, whose reputation we don’t know. The journal Neuromolecular Medicine is at least published by Springer Verlag, but the article on something about aluminum is not obviously connected to the issue of vaccinations; since the references weren’t footnoted, we really can’t have any idea.

Indeed, I checked with a polymath colleague who happens to be a PhD epidemiologist and the director of the public health program at Michigan State University. As a former military intelligence officer, he also runs the critical thinking skills course for FBI intelligence at Quantico. As he put it,

        Your initial impressions are correct. The Medical Veritas site is bunk dressed up to look 'academic.' The claimed association between vaccines and autism spectrum disorder has been well debunked. These folks get bogged down in confirmation bias and not appreciating that correlation is NOT causality. The second site is difficult for me to properly assess as I know almost nothing about these topics. However, I can find no serious publications in JAMA or NEJM that even reference them.

I did manage to find a single article in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) that referenced a single article in the ‘Nutraceuticals’ publication, but that’s not an encouraging count.

I am far less an expert on vaccination, but I do know crankiness when I see it. Mass vaccination programs have wiped out diseases that used to wipe out millions. Remember smallpox? If you don’t remember it personally, you can thank vaccination programs for that. And thus, this has got to stop. Our efforts to move Travis County from the Blue to the Purple and then to the Red will founder if we can’t remove this kind of nonsense from our platform.