Douglas S. Mayen
12th Grade English
Ms. Brophy
11 March 2016
Xenophobia - Fear of the Unknown Ignorance has played a major role in a multitude of events that happened throughout history. Ignorance can be cause due to a number of reasons; being oblivious about a certain subject, not trying to understand the other point of view about the subject, to caught up in one’s own life to think about others, ignoring factual statements so their beliefs would not be considered wrong, etc. Being ignorant is not always a bad things, it could lead to an enlightenment about a subject that they never knew about. An ignorance of one person cannot really do much, but the ignorance of many like minded individuals can do something. There have been many examples …show more content…
Those who are against vaccine use Wakefield’s paper as a viable source for their cause even though it has been regarded as false and Andrew Wakefield a hack. In “Vaccines and Autism: A Tale of Shifting Hypotheses” they give five reasons on why Wakefield’s views and paper on the matter were not accepted. They first explained that Wakefield’s attempt at a test was flawed from the beginning due to not having a control group within the study to deem if it was the MMR vaccine causing autism or if it was coincidental. Secondly the data for the study was not collected completely. Thirdly, the gastrointestinal symptoms did not occur in past autism victims as a symptoms. Fourthly, the MMR vaccine have not been found to cause intestinal inflammation or loss of the intestinal barrier function. And lastly, the claim that the peptides seeping through the bloodstream into the brain was never identified nor proven (Gerber). With the Anti vaccine movement growing in size many researchers have gone out of their way to prove that there is no connection between the MMR vaccine and autism. There have been “several features of large-scale vaccination programs allowed for excellent descriptive and observational studies—specifically, large numbers of subjects, which generated substantial statistical power; high-quality vaccination records, which provided reliable historical data; multinational use of similar vaccine constituents and schedules; electronic medical records, which facilitated accurate analysis of outcome data” (Gerber) yet the anti vaccine movement deny no matter how much proof there
12th Grade English
Ms. Brophy
11 March 2016
Xenophobia - Fear of the Unknown Ignorance has played a major role in a multitude of events that happened throughout history. Ignorance can be cause due to a number of reasons; being oblivious about a certain subject, not trying to understand the other point of view about the subject, to caught up in one’s own life to think about others, ignoring factual statements so their beliefs would not be considered wrong, etc. Being ignorant is not always a bad things, it could lead to an enlightenment about a subject that they never knew about. An ignorance of one person cannot really do much, but the ignorance of many like minded individuals can do something. There have been many examples …show more content…
Those who are against vaccine use Wakefield’s paper as a viable source for their cause even though it has been regarded as false and Andrew Wakefield a hack. In “Vaccines and Autism: A Tale of Shifting Hypotheses” they give five reasons on why Wakefield’s views and paper on the matter were not accepted. They first explained that Wakefield’s attempt at a test was flawed from the beginning due to not having a control group within the study to deem if it was the MMR vaccine causing autism or if it was coincidental. Secondly the data for the study was not collected completely. Thirdly, the gastrointestinal symptoms did not occur in past autism victims as a symptoms. Fourthly, the MMR vaccine have not been found to cause intestinal inflammation or loss of the intestinal barrier function. And lastly, the claim that the peptides seeping through the bloodstream into the brain was never identified nor proven (Gerber). With the Anti vaccine movement growing in size many researchers have gone out of their way to prove that there is no connection between the MMR vaccine and autism. There have been “several features of large-scale vaccination programs allowed for excellent descriptive and observational studies—specifically, large numbers of subjects, which generated substantial statistical power; high-quality vaccination records, which provided reliable historical data; multinational use of similar vaccine constituents and schedules; electronic medical records, which facilitated accurate analysis of outcome data” (Gerber) yet the anti vaccine movement deny no matter how much proof there