Excuse me for a few moments while I catch my breath. I’ve been laughing so hard that I can’t write.
As anyone who has read this blog knows, I have no patience for vaccine rejectionists. They are uneducated, illogical and immoral. But even I am sometimes amazed at the naked stupidity and gullibility of vaccine rejectionists.
The latest post at Age of Autism should be studied as a classic in the annals of vaccine rejectionist “reasoning.” The blog breathlessly announces that there have been more miscarriage events associated with Gardasil than other vaccines.
As my children would say: Duh!
The folks at AofA seem to think this is surprising and means that Gardasil is dangerous. That’s hilarious!
It’s hardly surprising that Gardasil, the ONLY vaccine given exclusively to women of reproductive age has more miscarriage EVENTS than other vaccines. Was anyone expecting that vaccines given to prepubertal children were going to be associated with miscarriages? What’s next: “puberty causes miscarriages” because there are more miscarriage events after puberty than before?
Here’s what I can’t figure out. Did the geniuses who run AofA actually think this was a “finding”? Or are they so cynical did they just fed it to their readers assuming they’d be too gullible to notice that the claim is absurd?
Moreover, the number of miscarriages in meaningless. The only meaningful measurement is the miscarriage RATE (the number of miscarriages divided by the number of pregnant women who received the Gardasil vaccine). And since the natural miscarriage rate is 20%, that number would need to be substantially higher than 20% to merit any consideration that Gardasil leads to miscarriage. But of course the AofA article does not bother to mention the miscarriage rate, doesn’t even bother to calculate it.
Amazingly, when I commented on the post, the AofA folks actually printed the comment. It was followed by expressions of outrage and lots and lots and lots of words. Yet not a single person could tell us the miscarriage RATE, and some apparently didn’t even understand that they had been fooled.
The only shocking aspect of this post is that some people are stupid enough and gullible enough to think it is meaningful.
