On the Crime of Heresy Against the Vaccine Religion

Introduction

There is something wrong when you are not allowed to question public vaccine policy without automatically being labeled as "anti-science", a believer in "pseudoscience", or even a "conspiracy theorist". The subject of vaccines is a serious one, and deserves to be taken seriously. Concerned parents are asking legitimate questions, and they deserve serious answers rather than dismissals. The public discussion about vaccines is essentially non-existent. Instead, the message we are told is that there is nothing to discuss. The mainstream media, for its part, has utterly failed to properly inform the public about the subject of vaccines, and rather than engaging in respectful debate, there is a tendency to try to bully people into silence and compliance. In this endeavor, the mainstream media has useful partners in the blogosphere.

As someone who is openly critical of vaccine policy, I expect to be attacked and have such labels mindlessly flung at me. So I wasn't surprised to discover that one of the more notorious apologists for public vaccine policy, an anonymous blogger who goes by the moniker "Skeptical Raptor", set his sights on me recently for an article I wrote in response to a Washington Post op-ed by Dr. Daniel Summers. Dr. Summers took the usual dogmatic approach to the subject, insisting there is nothing to debate, just get your damned shots. The purpose of my rejoinder to his op-ed was to illustrate why this insistence is wrong. There is a discussion to be had about vaccines, and it's past time we started having it.

Raptor's response to that article of mine provides me with the opportunity to reiterate that same point, as well as to illuminate the kinds of tactics employed by those who try to intimidate into silence anyone who dares to question public vaccine policy -- rather than seriously addressing the legitimate concerns being raised.

Naturally, Raptor's post about my article is filled with such mindless attacks as:

• “Jeremy R. Hammond … attacked Dr. Summers with … tropes, myths, and conspiracy theories.”
• “Hammond uses pseudoscience….”
• “Hammond’s criticisms of Dr. Simmons [consist of] tropes, myths, conspiracy theories, cherry picking and, need I mention this, outright misinformation.”
• “But if you want to believe the ramblings of a right wing science denier, go right ahead.”

It’s instructive, given such vitriolic rhetoric, that Raptor fails to point to even a single error in fact or logic in anything I wrote in my rejoinder to Dr. Summers. (Which might explain why Raptor didn't link to my article so readers could check to see for themselves what I'd actually written, as opposed to his misportrayal.)

On Doctors' Confirmation Bias

In my article, I quoted Dr. Summers saying that if vaccines can cause autism, then pediatricians like him must either be “too incompetent to discern the relationship between the two” or “too monstrous to care”.

I observed that this gives us a useful insight into why doctors might easily succumb to confirmation bias, accepting of science that confirms their belief that they are competent and good while dismissing any evidence contradicting that belief. After all, how many doctors would be honest enough to admit that they are either incompetent or evil?

So how does Raptor respond to this observation? He writes:

First of all, Hammond does not quite understand confirmation bias. In fact, most of us who support vaccines use the scientific method – the evidence leads us to a conclusion. Hammond uses pseudoscience – establish a conclusion, like vaccines cause autism, and ignore all evidence that does not support his beliefs.... Frankly, Hammond is projecting the problems with his own arguments onto Dr. Simmons.

In other words, Raptor is saying that I'm the one guilty of confirmation bias, and that I don't understand what confirmation bias is. So what is confirmation bias? Here's how Raptor defines it:

[C]onfirmation bias is simply the tendency for individuals to favor information or data that support their beliefs. It is also the tendency for people to only seek out information that supports their a priori, or pre-existing, conclusions, and subsequently ignores evidence that might refute that pre-existing conclusion.

I'm perfectly content to use that definition to reiterate the point I made in my response to Summers: that doctors will tend to have a confirmation bias because it would be difficult for them to accept that something they did to a child with the intention of helping that child might have ended up harming that child.

Note that Raptor does not actually address this point. He simply asserts that I don't understand confirmation bias without bothering to demonstrate in what way I don't understand it and meaninglessly declares that doctors "use the scientific method" -- as though having a medical degree meant that a person couldn't possibly have such a psychological conflict.

Compare this with Dr. Joseph Mercola of the leading health information website Mercola.com, a physician who once vaccinated his patients and had to overcome this very inner conflict himself; Dr. Mercola in a recent article on his website quoted my observation about this natural tendency toward confirmation bias among doctors, then added:

As a doctor, I can empathize with this psychological conundrum. It's a terrible feeling to realize that, at some point in your life, you didn't have the knowledge you should have had and you led your patients the wrong way.

In conclusion, Raptor, rather than actually addressing my valid point, resorts to obfuscation.

As for his charge that I'm guilty of confirmation bias, here Raptor is simply resorting to strawman argumentation, attributing to me logic that I did not use in my response to Summers' op-ed. His protest against what I did say in my article on the subject of vaccines and autism is instructive.