Tag: vaccination

On conspiracy theories and Santa Claus.

On conspiracy theories and Santa Claus.

Our daughter wants to visit dungeon-master Santa.

This isn’t as scary as it sounds – the local mall Santa happens to be a developer for Dungeons & Dragons.  Unfortunately, our daughter has a bit of trouble with impulse control.  I’ve heard that this is normal for three year olds.

santa-2990434_640“What would you say to other kids about Santa?” we asked her.

“I’d tell them that Santa isn’t real.”

“But, remember, only their parents are supposed to tell them that.”

“Why?”

“Well, you should know that we will always tell you the truth.  If we’re telling you a story, we’ll let you know that it’s a story.  But some other families are different.  They want their kids to believe the dungeon master lives on the North Pole with an army of elves.”

“Why?”

“I … I dunno, dude.  But don’t tell the other kids, okay?”

I’ve written previously about the harm in conspiring against children – belief in one conspiracy theory makes people more likely to believe in another.  People who believe that the government is covering up evidence of UFOs are also more likely to believe that vaccines cause autism, fluoride in the water enables mind control, and the Earth is flat.

And, sadly, we start our citizens early.  The Santa story is a vast conspiracy, a large number of authority figures (grown-ups) collaborating to keep the child in a state of ignorance.  A local philosophy professor told me that he felt the story was valuable as a measure of intellectual development – at first the child believes, but then begins to notice flaws in the story.

“Uh, if it takes two minutes to deliver presents, it would take a thousand years to visit everyone in the United States, or two million Santas on Christmas Eve – but not every house has a chimney!”

8236362941_3fa1316511_b

I think it would be cynical to lie to children as a developmental metric.  This measurement changes the child (which is not Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, f.y.i.).  The experience of uncovering one conspiracy will train children to search for conspiracies elsewhere.  Perhaps a child is supposed to realize that there’s no Santa at seven years old, that there are no gods at eleven, that the moon landing was faked at thirteen, that JFK is smoking blunts in the Illuminati’s underground lair at seventeen.

After all, the Santa story isn’t the final time we conspire against children.  In my school’s health classes, all sexuality outside of marriage was described as fundamentally bad.  Even if we somehow dodged pregnancy and disease, disrobed physical affection would break our hearts and leave us feeling guilty and ashamed.  Recreational drug use was described in similarly bleak terms (by a teacher who drank coffee every morning).

Students grow up, get laid, drink beer, smoke pot.  Grown-ups were hypocritically hiding the truth.  Sex is fun.  Drugs are fun.

What else were they hiding?

(Have you seen all those children’s books with pictures of happy animals on the farm?)

A lot of the guys in jail believe in conspiracy theories.  Despite a plenitude of dudes with Aryan tattoos, I’ve never heard anybody on a full-tilt ZOG rant, but I’ve been told about Nostradamus, Biblical prophecy, the CIA (to be fair, I’ve spent a fair bit of time talking about MK Ultra, too).

To an extent, I understand why.  The people in jail are being conspired against by judges, informants, and the police.  With lives in thrall to the overt conspiracy of our criminal justice system, covert conspiracy seems probable, too.

And so, in preparation for this essay, I took a few minutes at the beginning of class to say, “There’s an administrator at the local school who thinks the Earth is flat.  Says so to kids.  You guys hear anybody talking about that?”

flatearth“Oh, yeah, there was this dude in A block!  He was talking about it like all the time!”

“Now he’s in seg.”

“It’s like, has he never seen a globe?”

And the guys wondered what that administrator was doing inside a school.

“Cause kids go there to learn, right?”

Kids do need to learn critical thinking.  They should question whether the things they’re taught make sense.  I’ve heard plenty of teachers make erroneous claims, and not just in Indiana’s public schools – some professors at Northwestern and Stanford didn’t know what they were talking about either.  Even so, I think it’s unhelpful to train children by having them uncover the Santa story.  That experience is a step along the way to thinking your sensory experience has primacy over abstract data.

After all, the planet feels flat enough.  It looks flat from most human vantages.  And it would be cheaper to deceive people than to send spacecraft to the moon (a former colleague recently went to the International Space Station for some incredibly expensive molecular biology experiments.  This was a huge undertaking – and she was only 0.1% of the way to the moon).

If you take a kid for his MMR vaccine, and shortly after vaccination he seems to regress into autism, that narrative – which you watched with your own eyes! – is more compelling than a bunch of medical statistics proving there’s no connection.  If you comb the Bible and find lines mirroring current events, that narrative also must seem more compelling than the thought that history is chaotic.  Physicists from Einstein till the present day have been dismayed that quantum mechanics feels so unintuitive.

It’s tricky to find a balance between our own senses and expert opinion.  It’s even harder in a world where numerous authority figures and media outlets have been caught spreading lies.

And so, while I try not to judge others’ parenting decisions, please, take a few minutes to think about the holiday stories you tell.  If you’d like to live in a country where the citizenry can agree on basic facts, lying to your kids might be not be the way to get there.

On wasteful medical spending.

On wasteful medical spending.

Given that our bizarre medical spending practices could doom the U.S., it feels strange to write about this topic as a participant-observer.  So let me state upfront: I tried!  I argued with my medical care providers for several minutes, trying to keep them from wasting money.  I used logic.  I cited evidence.  I lost the argument.  They stuck to their position with the unwavering intransigence of bureaucratic rule-followers.

They were probably right to ignore me.  If a bigwig in a suit writes guidelines saying, “Do it this way,” a nurse or doctor might be fired for doing things differently.

marktsedita-MUMPS
Art by MTS<:U on Flickr.

The background: many people in my hometown recently contracted mumps.  Those who work with young people were instructed to get a “mumps titer” — this means measuring the concentration of mumps antibodies in a person’s blood — and those with low readings would be told to get vaccinated.

Sounds sensible enough.  But the titer is more expensive than the vaccine, and we have the vaccine in abundance, so I went in and asked them to just vaccinate me.  Yes, I was vaccinated already as a child, but it doesn’t hurt to get a booster.

They refused.  It’s a live vaccine, see?  To vaccinate you, they inject the actual virus.  The goal is to produce a “subclinical infection.”  But some adults have an adverse reaction — they get sick.  To minimize risk, our health care provider wanted to vaccinate only those people who seemed to need it.

The problem with this logic is fairly clear — although some people may get sick from the vaccination, the people who get sick are going to be those who were not yet immune.  By screening people with high titers, the total number of patients suffering an adverse reaction won’t go down at all.

The faulty logic would be problematic even if the mumps titer was a good assay.  But it’s not.  It’s fairly well known that it produces many false negative results — people who appear not to be immune to mumps, but are.  According to my health care provider’s policy, many people who are already immune to mumps will be vaccinated again.

This is fine from a health perspective, of course.  A second immunization will not hurt.  These people are very unlikely to get sick from the attenuated virus.  The only problem is that money was wasted on the titer.

Worse, common titer assays have a fairly high false positive rate: that is, people who appear to be immune, but aren’t.  Under my health care provider’s plan, these people won’t be vaccinated.  Now, these are people who might get sick from the vaccine — but they’d get much sicker if exposed to the actual virus.  If they’re not vaccinated, they’ll be left at high risk.

800px-Study_Participant_Receives_NIAID-GSK_Candidate_Ebola_Vaccine

Compared to simply vaccinating everyone, testing everyone by mumps titer costs somewhere around twice as much.  Add in the number of vaccines that have to be given after the tests and the plan is even more expensive — even if everyone in the population already is immune to mumps and you’re only giving booster shots to those with false negatives, that could easily be twenty percent or more.  If you’re dealing with a mixed population where some people aren’t immune, the outlook is worse.  Then you’re also risking that someone with a false positive result, whom you decline to vaccinate, gets sick.  Mumps can make you very sick, especially adults.  It can cause brain inflammation — my father, who contracted mumps as a child, needed a spinal tap to get through it.  A scary procedure.  Much more expensive than the vaccine.

(Well, a spinal tap now is much more expensive than the vaccine now.  For my father to have been vaccinated, someone would have had to build a time machine and launch the shot into the past.  Time travel takes huge amounts of energy & is rather more expensive than a spinal tap.)

Nobody at my health care clinic was convinced.  They were adamant.  No vaccine without phlebotomy!

At least the universe has a sense of humor.  After all that, of course my titer would be a false negative.  Their money wasted, they called me back and had me get the unnecessary shot.  Just like I’d requested from the beginning.