How Anti-vaccine Activists Lie: Vaccine Inserts

If there is one thing anti-vaxxers love it is an insert. Also known as patient information leaflets, vaccine inserts are pamphlets included with vaccines. They cover the important information for the clinician and patient about the vaccine. It is the tightly folded paper with the tiny font that comes with most medications detailing when and how the medication should (and should not) be administered. It also details information about potential side effects and adverse reactions which have been reported following receiving the vaccine. It is the last part of that which get antivaccine folk hot under the collar.

The leaflets have to state everything that has been reported after the vaccine has been given to a patient. The thing antivaxxers don’t get is that they are legal documents rather than scientific documents. In the adverse reactions section every adverse reaction during the trial from every trial carried out on the vaccine must be listed. Which sounds good on its face. Here’s the mistake that antivaxxers make however, the leaflet isn’t actually saying the vaccine caused the negative outcomes. It is just saying the outcome occurred during a trial.

This is what I mean by the leaflet being a legal document rather than a scientific one. There is no attempt to establish a causal link between the events of the patient being vaccinated. The leaflet isn’t even saying there plausibly could be a link between the events. It is simply fulfilling the legal requirement of stating all adverse reactions that occurred during testing of the vaccine. This doesn’t stop countless antivaxx websites and facebook groups claiming that the insert provides proof that not only do vaccines cause autism, asthma, type 1 diabetes and many others, but that the manufacturers are aware that they do.

That last part highlights a particularly great example of sloppy thinking by antivaxxers. They are claiming that drug companies know that vaccines cause autism but there is a massive conspiracy to cover up that fact. Now, if there was an international cabal of evil sociopaths poisoning kids, is it really likely they would admit to knowing they were doing so? What epic hubris would be required to carry out such a massive conspiracy and then advertise it on bits of paper distributed with every dose of the vaccine? That’s before even getting into why they are doing it in the first place.

The dreaded aluminium (with a side of the futility of goal post moving)

The latest hot thing in anti-vaxx circles is Aluminium. First it was the thimerosal. That was taken out of most vaccines but of course there has to be something in vaccines that are bad so it was on to the next thing. In comes aluminium alarm. This in itself is a great example of goal post moving but I wanted to talk about a specific example I recently encountered on Twitter.

I have included a screencap of the initial tweet that caught my attention. What is the FDA doing allowing a vaccine to be given that has 5 times the limit of aluminium in it? Seems weird, like it’s a claim that should be investigated further to me. Since this exchange I’ve seen the line repeated many times. “The Hep B vaccine contains far more aluminium than the FDA allows”. So some investigation was required. A minute or two on google turned up the antivaxxer in question had slightly mistyped the true limit set by the FDA. It is 850mcg, not 50mcg as they claimed above. Easy mistake to make. Maybe their screen was dirty when they looked it up and the 8 was perfectly obscured.

So I pointed out the mistake and asked if there was still a problem since 250mcg is way below 850mcg. Of course there was. You can’t score a point against an opponent who removes the goal posts every time you move. Not that I view this “debate” as an us vs them situation, a battle with wins and losses. But it does make the conversation pointless. If you are going to make a point, at least acknowledge it when you’re shown to be wrong. Instead of taking it as a learning experience, the person just said “oh well 250mcg is too high”. They may be right but their point was that vaccines breach the limits set by the FDA and they’ve just changed the claim like nothing happened.

Obviously they’ve just asserted 250mcg is too much based on… a gut feeling? That’s bad but not uncommon. At least it can be discussed. There is no point, however, talking with someone who will just throw up claims you have to shut down like whack a mole. Never conceding points, never showing even a small indication they care about the facts. It seems clear that the person on the other end either just wants to catch you on one point to claim total victory (no matter how many points they conceded) or will never change their mind.

How Anti-vaccine Advocates Lie: The Gish Gallop

The Gish Gallop is a strategy named after the creationist Duane Gish. The idea is simple. You throw out so many arguments that the opponent doesn’t have time to refute every point leaving the audience with many points left unchallenged. I have no doubt anti-vaccine debaters use this strategy in live debates but it is used in social media posts very often. It goes something like “164 papers proving the autism and vaccine link” with a link to a website that has individual links to pages of scientific papers. Something that no doubt many people would have seen on Facebook or Twitter.

So what’s the deal? Where is the lie? Has this person found the hidden stash of research by rogue scientists that are sick of their cheques from Big Pharma? Research that somehow got published by reputable journals who just didn’t know what they were publishing? Of course not. None of the papers actually show what the poster claims they show. In reality, the person originally putting the post together has likely just gone to Pubmed and typed in “autism” and then just put a random set of links into a blog post. The person sharing the post never bothers to read even a single paper. They see a big number and think “wow that’s a lot of evidence” and just click share.

The reason I compare this to the Gish gallop is that it would take days to read every paper and explain why they don’t show a link between vaccines and autism. I’ve seen bloggers actually go to the trouble of doing this but I do feel like it’s a waste of time (unless you really like reading papers of course). The person who posted it generally doesn’t care and by the time you refute every paper (or even just the top ten) they have a new list. It’s whack a mole. I’ve heard someone suggest asking for a top 5 or 10. Tell them to just give the cream of the crop, if you’re the kind of masochist that engages with antivaxxers on a regular basis.

This is a very common tactic in a range of pseudosciences. It’s not always in the form of the gallop. I’ve seen petitions for various things where they cite a single paper. I saw a petition once that was calling on the government to withdraw the HPV as it allegedly caused cancer. Attached was a link to a “damning paper” that apparently confirmed how deadly this vaccine was. The paper referenced in the petition didn’t even mention the vaccine. It even predated its invention. It did however, mention cervical cancer which was enough for the creator of the petition.

The message here is if you see someone posting a paper that supposedly supports something (whether or not it seems dubious since fact-checking is always important) just be sure that paper says what the person showing it to you claims it does. If they go for the full gallop, ask for the best stuff only or chose a random 5 or so yourself if you don’t want to engage. Even if you just read the abstract, and if the paper is behind a paywall, the abstract is usually available. That should give enough of an idea what the paper says. If you aren’t all that scientifically literate you can at least see if the paper even mentions vaccines.

How Antivaccine Advocates Lie: The Bait and Switch

The bait and switch aka the unit switcheroo is a classic pseudoscience technique beloved by antivaccine advocates. The general form used by antivaxxers is give a maximum dose of a scary sounding chemical and then say how much is in a vaccine. The amount in the vaccine exceeds the maximum dose recommended by the FDA or similar governing body. Panic ensues.

So what is happening here? Has the FDA just not noticed the amount of Scary Chemical X in vaccines? Are they deliberately allowing too much SCX in the vaccines to depopulate the world?Or is it just a case of antivaxxers having fun with units and hoping no one notices? Not surprisingly it is the last one.

Sometimes its a simple order of magnitude shift. A milligram here somehow becomes a microgram there. For example, say the daily maximum exposure to SCX is 0.2mg but a vaccine contains 3ug they will claim the vaccine has too much SCX in it. However they have switched units so what they should be saying is the maximum exposure is 200ug and the vaccine has 3ug. Consistency is the key.

The other, more common, trick is to state a total amount of something in a vaccine and then compare that to a rate. In this case the antivaxxer will say Vaccine A contains 100ug of SCX but the maximum dose of SCX in a day is 50ug/kg. What they are missing, intentionally or otherwise is the units have changed. It has gone from ug to ug/kg. You actually have to calculate the second amount on a person by person basis. Once you do even the most basic math you see that anyone over 2kg is going to be fine tolerating the full dose of SCX from Vaccine A.

So the next time someone tells you a vaccine has too much of a given chemical in it to be safe, check they are using the same units throughout. It’s an easy mistake to make but it’s not always a mistake. Sometimes it’s very deliberate.

Just as a note, I will come back to these in the future and add real examples. For now I just want to get the main ideas out.

An Introduction of Sorts

Introductions can be hard to write. I’m never sure quite how to begin.

So why write a blog? First of all I just want to practice writing. For the most part I don’t care if anyone reads this. I can’t imagine many people will. However, I want to practice putting my ideas into words at least fortnightly. Secondly I want to record my thoughts on various topics and the research I did on them since my memory isn’t fantastic. Thirdly to give me something to do in my downtime other than endless scrolling on social media. A hobby of sorts and motivation to stay up on the news, looking for topics to blog about.

Lastly, and most importantly, I want somewhere to write primers on how pseudoscience misleads people. I’ve been following movements like creationism and anti-vaccine movements for years and since they all use the same playbook some of the tricks they use apply to all movements. I will be mainly focusing on anti-vaccine movement since I consider creationism to be fairly passe at this point and far less of an immediate threat.

I’ve been meaning to do this for years now and I regret not starting a long time ago but better late than never hey? I have a few topics locked and loaded so I may try to get those out ASAP and then refine them later. I’ve got a lot to figure out but I decided I just needed to start. So here we are. Welcome!