Thursday, August 8, 2013

Trau schau wem (a Dr Bob post)

dedicated to Chris Hickie, MD, PhD

It's been a while since we talked about Dr. Bob Sears, the author of The Vaccine Book, in which he advertises his "alternative vaccination schedule" (which almost doubles the number of office visits at $$$). Dr. Bob, as he likes to call himself, has been widely criticised for his anti-vaccine-critical stance, by us and many others. Don't know how people get the idea he could be anti-vaccine, actually - cannot be his staunchly pro-vaccine friends, like Andy Wakefield


It cannot be his absolutely unwavering pro-vaccine activism on Mothering.com:

 
For any parent who decides not to vaccinate, I don't try to talk them into vaccinating. Going unvaccinated is not a dangerous choice. It's a reasonably small risk.
It cannot be his well measured and positive foreword to an unreservedly pro-vaccine book:



.../... blablabla .../...


With so much care not to be mistaken for someone who is actually against vaccination, I must wonder how Dr. Bob Sears ended up one of the administrators of the:

Parents and Others against Vaccinations 

(my emphasis) facebook group. Ever so slightly embarrassing to get caught on that one amongst anti-vaccine's finest:


If I had not done so already, I would seriously seek my vaccine information somewhere else.

*Trau schau wem = watch whom you trust

11 comments:

  1. "Out, damned spot! Out, I say!"

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  2. Great post, Catherina -- From Stacy Herlihy

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  3. Catherina, you sent me Dr Bob's autism book to review. The Pwd found it and "reviewed" it. From what I can gather, it's rubbish compared to the Argos catalogue :)

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  4. Catherina, Isn't Dr. Bob in fine company on that FB group. You need to fix "pro-vaccine" to "anti-vaccine". He also tries to weasel word his contribution to the not-thinking moms' book. What a pathetic excuse for a physician.

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    1. it is sarcasm, Science Mom...

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    2. Sorry, clearly my sarcasm detector is off, which is highly unusual. Why the AMA allows Bozos like this to operate in the manner they do is beyond me. I sympathise with Dr. Hickie's frustration.

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  5. AMA, AAP, AAFP, CDC--I don't get why any of them won't grow a pair and do what's right to prevent a complete and total fraud like Sears from doing what he is doing to public health, unchallenged.

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  6. ...and thanks for the dedication, Catherina.

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  7. It's a well deserved dedication Dr. Chris. It's doctors like you who do the right thing for their young patients, by taking the time to explain to parents the benefits of following the CDC/AAP recommended schedule for timely and complete immunizations.

    Dr. Bob doesn't like to be reminded that it was his young deliberately unvaccinated patient, who contracted measles in Switzerland and who was later identified as the "index case" in the large San Diego outbreak of measles during January-February 2008:

    http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5708a3.htm

    "...The index patient was an unvaccinated boy aged 7 years who had visited Switzerland with his family, returning to the United States on January 13, 2008. He had fever and sore throat on January 21, followed by cough, coryza, and conjunctivitis. On January 24, he attended school. On January 25, the date of his rash onset, he visited the offices of his family physician and his pediatrician. A diagnosis of scarlet fever was ruled out on the basis of a negative rapid test for streptococcus. When the boy's condition became worse on January 26, he visited a children's hospital inpatient laboratory, where blood specimens were collected for measles antibody testing; later that day, he was taken to the same hospital's emergency department because of high fever 104°F (40°C) and generalized rash. No isolation precautions were instituted at the doctors' offices or hospital facilities.

    The boy's measles immunoglobulin M (IgM) positive laboratory test result was reported to the county health department on February 1, 2008. During January 31--February 19, a total of 11 additional measles cases in unvaccinated infants and children aged 10 months--9 years were identified. These 11 cases included both of the index patient's siblings (rash onset: February 3), five children in his school (rash onset: January 31--February 17), and four additional children (rash onset: February 6--10) who had been in the pediatrician's office on January 25 at the same time as the index patient. Among these latter four patients, three were infants aged <12 months. One of the three infants was hospitalized for 2 days for dehydration; another infant traveled by airplane to Hawaii on February 9 while infectious.

    Two generations of measles cases were identified. The first generation (eight cases) included the index patient's two siblings, two playmates from his school, and the four children from the pediatrician's office. The second generation cases included three children from the index patient's school: a sibling of a child from the first generation and two friends of one of the index patient's siblings..."

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  8. Sears is parroting Jenny McCarthy's talking point when he says autism was once 1:10,000. There is no basis for that figure. When I asked Dan "Clinic for Special Children" Olmstead about that number, he cited Treffert (1971), who found .7:10,000 in Wisconsin. But Treffert was using computer data to count children institutionalized with an autism. That's like using membership lists for campus Young Republican clubs to estimate the minority population.

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  9. Dr. Bob Sears was interviewed on a radio show and there is an article up about that interview.

    I just posted a long comment and I nailed Dr. Sears with the MMWR article that identified his deliberately unvaccinated young patient as the index case responsible for the 2008 San Diego measles outbreak:

    http://www.kpbs.org/news/2013/sep/18/shot-delays-alternative-vaccine-schedules-mean-few/

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