A couple of weeks ago, I linked to an amazingly ignorant antivaccination screed published in the Winona Daily News. In the comments, I was made aware of another antivaccination screed in the form of a letter to the editor to the Winona Post. (Unfortunately, I am unable to locate it online.) Now, today, I find that there are people in Winona who are trying to outdo Jim and Laurie Jenkinson (the authors of the first article) in serious stupidity in the form of a letter to the editor published in the Winona Daily News entitled It Is Important to Learn More About Vaccinations.
I’d normally agree that it’s important to learn more about vaccinations were it not for my observation that apparently the “more about vaccinations” that the authors of this article, Andrea Dornbusch, Helen Sutter and Maria Grunz, want you to “learn about” is a load of antivaccinationist distortions, misinformation, conspiracy mongering, and logical fallacies. Indeed, the “more” that these brilliant scholars (who can’t seem to write a coherent sentence) want you to learn includes rants about “trace” amounts of thimerosal remaining in vaccines, rants against big pharma, and a real gem of antivaccinationist stupidity that distinguishes itself from the pack through its sheer chutzpah:
We do not allow some of the ingredients found in vaccines to be sprayed on our food, yet we are injecting them into our children. It will always be a debate if any ingredient in vaccines is the cause for a wide variety of disorders because people are people and everyone has their opinion.
How do we know this?
Because three twits writing a letter to a small town newspaper think so. That’s right. Science doesn’t matter. All those epidemiological studies that have failed to find a link between thimerosal and autism don’t matter. All those epidemiological studies that failed to find a link between vaccines in general and autism don’t matter. All that matters is that “everyone has their opinion.”
Never mind that opinions are like…well, you’ve heard the saying before.
The Winona Antivax Three do sort of get one thing right, though. As long as people as ignorant as them have “opinions” that they can somehow represent as being on the same order of magnitude of value as scientific data, there will always be a “debate.” It just won’t be a scientific debate. It’s a debate with basic science and epidemiology on the one side and overheated scientifically ignorant conspiracy theories on the other side. In other words, it’s a pseudodebate, and it’s one in which scientists have one hand tied behind their backs because it is considered “arrogant” to tell such people bluntly that they just plain have no clue what they’re talking about.
Still, I wonder. What is it about Winona, MN that seems to produce so many antivaccination rants? Is it something in the water? I don’t recall ever having heard of the town before I was made aware of the first article that set me off.