Morons of the Internet: Alex Jones (18/02/15)

This is the segment where I scour my favorite forums around the internet and find some particularly interesting articles about current affairs told in the words from some of my favorite human beings.

In this edition we have loudmouthed political commentator Alex Jones, who's got his YouTube channel to produce a ridiculous video that goes against both logic and statistics.
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http://www.infowars.com/measles-vaccine-kills-more-people-than-the-disease/
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I'll just begin with some facts since there isn't many contained in Jones' video. The measles vaccination has been widely distributed to children in the USA since the mid 1960's. In that time the disease has been almost eradicated throughout not just the USA, but many other first world countries who have similar vaccination programmes. The injection itself has an 85-95% chance of working effectively, which doesn't make it a perfect solution to eradicating measles, but it's a lot better than the 0% if we had the same attitude as Alex Jones. The graph below will show you what a radical change the vaccination has had on the US population, and so it would take a cataclysmic moron to argue against that. Luckily for us we have one right here.

Do I need to continue? I can't believe I'm having to defend a vaccination that has quite clearly saved the lives of thousands, if not millions of Americans over the past few decades. The fact that a human being could become infected after taking the vaccination is almost nothing. The attenuated dose means that a live virus is injected into your body, although that virus has had it's antigens modified to make it harmless to your immune system, but still giving the body information to stimulate the specific lymphocytes. Of course they didn't tell you this in the video because the thought of a live virus in your body isn't a pleasant one, making this video a very dirty piece of propaganda. This is further supported by the fact that none of their quoted sources had a control to compare data. The video claims that the fatalities were caused by the vaccination in a population that has been widely immunised, yet they didn't compare that with a population that hadn't been vaccinated, so how can we tell it's the vaccination? If we are to trust the World Health Organisation, who let's face it aren't known for blatantly lying and misleading their audience, then the statistics prove the reverse. They state that 15 million lives have been saved by the vaccination. That's a hell of a lot more than the 100 lives the video claims have been taken by the programme. So just remind me, is it the vaccination that's the threat to the population, or just the ignorance of people like Mr. Jones?

I just don't understand how you can claim that vaccination kills more people than the actual disease when the official statistics show that's complete bullshit. Maybe you should tell the 145,000 people killed each year that you wouldn't be killed by the vaccination you never had. Logic dictates that if the number of infected has been drastically reduced after not just one, but two immunisation programmes, then the vaccination cannot possibly be killing more people than it's saving, and that actually it's a very effective programme. This argument is a bit like turning down the various drugs for cancer because people have still died and been effected by cancer after taking them. It's just unbelievable. The only other possibility is that the virus somehow managed to evolve at the same time as the vaccinations, but as a devout christian Mr. Jones doesn't believe in that either. Where is your argument? Do you not here every piece of logic screaming in your head that you can't possibly be right. Am I really supposed to believe that one day the virus randomly stopped effecting people at the same time as vaccinations were given out? You're argument makes no sense, and neither do your sources. My favorite is the one on how the disease spread from The Philippines, a country that declared the disease eradicated, and so it must have been the vaccination that spread the virus. We'll just forget about the 85-95% success rates and the fact that some people can't be vaccinated for medical reasons, because it was obviously immunisation that caused these cases. You just can't make a claim like that without backing it up with reliable data. So far they haven't done that with a single source.

Just by looking at recent history you can see that a similar issue occurred in 2005. There was a minor endemic in the USA due to a person not vaccinated returning from a trip to Romania, a country that doesn't have a measles programme. Measles is of course a highly contagious virus, and so the only reason an epidemic wasn't created was due to the local ring vaccination programme working effectively. If Mr. Jones claims that not being vaccinated is the right way to go then people will get killed because of his insolence and inability to use logic or statistics. His way would see the eradication of efficient ring vaccination programmes, and in time that would see the American total of fatalities equal that of third world countries. This is not about shaming people who don't follow the crowd, it's a matter of national security. If the government has solid evidence to suggest that this incident is potentially dangerous then I think it should be acceptable for them to dictate our lives. That's the price you pay for democracy. If their lying about it then that still doesn't explain the global studies or similarity with other viral infections. The above graph is all the evidence needed to suggest that the majority of the population shouldn't be penalised with the irresponsibility of the minority.

Overall Measles is a highly contagious disease, and so I implore people to not listen to morons like Alex Jones, but science instead. By dismissing the idea of vaccinations from a political commentator you're dismissing decades of peer reviewed studies and centuries of experimentation from people who know what they're talking about. Why should my child and country have to suffer because of your ignorance? Tell me, would you rather be complaining about the deaths of 100 Americans or the thousands of potential victims that we see in many countries worldwide today? Please people, it may be a matter of life or death. Don't trust the morons, trust the statistics.