I'm not so sure about that. There are parts of the world where vaccination programmes and the distribution of anti-retrovirals are seen as a CIA plot. This doesn't exactly help counter that view.
In contrast to actually handing out fake vaccines? Surely that is much worse.
There are parts of the world where vaccination programmes and the distribution of anti-retrovirals are seen as a CIA plot.
Boulder, Colorado, for example.
Being suspected of simultaneously vaccinating and using children's blood to carry out political plots could definitely be worse than being suspected of giving useless vaccines.
From the point of view of the hepatitus?
Just demand the needle after you get the vaccination and nobody can collect DNA by protecting you from polio.
From the point of view of the hepatitus?
From the point of view of someone who doesn't see the point of this particular vaccination in a world so full of other dangers.
That should be in the depression thread, no?
I thought one needed follow up shots for the Hep B vacc to be effective? Did they get those, too?
7: Would those people have gone to the clinic anyway? Giving somebody a fake vaccine is falsely telling them they have protection from a disease which means they might not take precautions against catching that disease.
9: The Hep B vaccine has proven to be longer lasting that first thought.
Just demand the needle after you get the vaccination and nobody can collect DNA by protecting you from polio.
That would only fuel your paranoia, Moby.
Hepatitis B is transmitted the same ways as Hepatitis C and HIV, so hopefully you'd still be taking basic precautions even with the vaccine.
What I'm imagining here are people who, probably because of religion or cultural tradition or suspicion of outsiders, have to be talked into taking any vaccine, by convincing them that it won't do them any harm or hamper their lives in any way. If you want to control a disease in a large geographical area, you probably have to work with communities who don't want to interfere with God's will, and try to find a way to vaccinate them anyway. Or else they'll ruin it for everybody by damaging herd immunity and making the disease continue to be endemic.
Giving out fake or real vaccines affects only the people who actually went to that particular clinic -- giving out fake vaccines would have been evil, but small-scale evil because the numbers are low. Letting it be known worldwide that vaccination clinics are likely to be a CIA plot has the potential for keeping a whole lot more people from getting vaccinated.
A classic ruse de guerre, I should think.
So what I'm saying is I'm not actually talking about this vaccination program in Pakistan. Just explaining how dangerous it can be for would-be vaccination campaigns to be suspected of doing ANYTHING ELSE besides just giving little injections based on altruistic motives.
14 suggests that they should have been more discrete.
I'm having a hard time making sense of the post title. Am I missing something obvious?
vaccination clinics are likely to be a CIA plot
"Likely to be" seems quite an overstatement.
14: Also, giving vaccines that don't actually work will probably do more to prevent people from accepting vaccines than the CIA plot thing plus the very specific evil done to the people getting the fake vaccines.
The real question is, why are our tax dollars being used to protect Osama bin Laden's family from hepatitis?
20: It was a fake (vaccination clinic), not a (fake vaccination) clinic.
Except it wasn't a fake vaccination clinic either. It was a vaccination clinic run under false pretenses.
Yeah, that was my first thought, that no one should cast doubts on vaccination programs. I was noticeably saddened by the tactic.
Maybe you have hepatitis from brushing your tongue with your toothbrush.
Also, giving vaccines that don't actually work will probably do more to prevent people from accepting vaccines than the CIA plot thing plus the very specific evil done to the people getting the fake vaccines.
Again, it depends on what "people" you're talking about. I don't want to sound like Colonial Magistrate Sir Skeffington Ormsley-Smythe talking about the simple ways of the savages of the Upper Bongo, but a lot of people who get vaccinated do so without any expectation that it's going to work. The motivation is more because the people trying to do the vaccination seem well-meaning and may be handing out useful things, so why not indulge them. Especially when there's dozens of things you might die from and this is not one of the things you especially worry about.
I'm looking for a citation, but IIRC there are actually millions of things you can die from.
When it comes to side effects of the war on terror, the vaccination under false pretenses of Pakistani children is probably one of the happier stories to be told, I should think.
I found it. There are 3,645,432 things you can die from.
Linkfail is rarely fatal in most patients. Please consult your physician before trying Linkfail.
When it comes to side effects of the war on terror, the fact that existence of absolute proof that Americans coming into your town to vaccinate children could be CIA agents won't make it more difficult to conduct public health outreach in troubled states a bit, and definitely won't make what was already a dangerous, ill-paid, but incredibly necessary job more dangerous is probably one of the happier stories to be told by liars, I should think.
I don't want to sound like Colonial Magistrate Sir Skeffington Ormsley-Smythe talking about the simple ways of the savages of the Upper Bongo,
Although it would be terribly amusing if you did, what?
Colonial Magistrate Sir Skeffington Ormsley-Smythe....
Pronounced "Sudden Early-Smith," for reasons lost to human memory.
OT: I saw former NYT restaurant critic Frank Bruni on the street today. I didn't yell "Thanks for making George W. Bush look benign, fatty," because I'm a feminist I'm very mild-mannered in most circumstances.
A story breaking about a vaccination fake-clinic collecting DNA for the CIA is not as bad as a story breaking about a fake-vaccination fake-clinic collecting DNA for the CIA.
It wasn't Americans vaccinating people; that would not have been spy-style. Even worse!, you say, because now the vaccines themselves are implicated! And I guess so, maybe, kinda, but I'd really like to see some evidence of angry Pakistani mobs burning boxes of vaccine before I get worked up myself.
I mean: America gives a heap of money to Pakistan, and they know it's because American wants to kill to get the bad guys living there, but that doesn't make them refuse the money.
Now, the article says that someone was actually allowed to enter the bin Laden compound to administer followup shots. I'm regrettably certain that future criminal masterminds will not allow unknown nurses to enter their compounds to administer vaccines from now on. But this chilling effect is, I submit, fairly minor, and it also suggests that the society is already fairly trusting of vaccines.
I don't think you have to come from Upper Volta to be suspicious of government-sponsored vaccinations. I mean, there's already lots of people around here, as Knecht alludes to in 3, who are suspicious of vaccines just for their vaccine-ness. I'm not personally going to turn down my next tetanus shot due to fears of CIA DNA-gathering, but certainly I'd be a little suspicious if someone just showed up at my door tomorrow offering to vaccinate me. ("It's free!" they'd say, and I'd say "How do I know you're not with the CIA?" and they'd say "The CIA is prohibited from carrying out operations against US citizens on US soil" and I'd say "Yeah right, I've heard that one before!")
Anyhow, yeah, the fallout from this particular incident is likely to be relatively minor, not least because it's not like there isn't already sufficient evidence by the shit-ton that would make most people in the Third World somewhat suspicious of Americans bearing gifts.
I guess I already said this, but the post title is really immensely important. This isn't like the government secretly wiretapping your phone even though you're not a terrorist; this is like you patronizing an ice cream van without realizing that it's full of CIA surveillance equipment. Even burning hatred of the CIA, I think, wouldn't make you decide to boycott ice cream once you found out the truth about the van.
(Unless the CIA actually is after you, but in that case, you probably should be suspicious of everything! Or seek professional help.)
Thank you, eliot, for once again demonstrating the wisdom of the analogy ban.
To clarify 1, I definitely think it's better that they were giving out real vaccines. But I do think it's a "big deal" that they chose vaccination as their ruse.
It wasn't Americans vaccinating people; that would not have been spy-style. Even worse!, you say, because now the vaccines themselves are implicated! And I guess so, maybe, kinda, but I'd really like to see some evidence of angry Pakistani mobs burning boxes of vaccine before I get worked up myself.
It's not necessarily Pakistan I'm thinking about. The "vaccinations/pharmaceuticals are a CIA/American plot" idea is very big in sub-Saharan Africa, and has helped the likes of Matthias Rath sell useless AIDS "cures", causing millions of needless deaths.
The "vaccinations/pharmaceuticals are a CIA/American plot" idea is very big in sub-Saharan Africa,.
Heck, it is a big issue in some communities in the United States.
I think it's almost impossible to overestimate how damaging something like this is. Even if the story turned out not to be true, it doesn't matter -- it just destroys whatever fragile trust there was. And that mistrust has a very, very, VERY long half-life.
Analogy ban! damn.
It's important to note that the "vaccinations are a CIA plot" idea came about when there was a lot of evidence that vaccinations are a life-saving medical technique and none that they were a CIA plot. So you really have to wonder if evidence that vaccines are a CIA plot is actually going to make a difference.
32: If for a given n you can die from n bullets to the head, then you can die from n+1 bullets to the head.
You can die from 1 bullet to the head.
Therefore, by induction, the number of things you can die from is infinite.
Not sure whether it's uncountably infinite, though.
48 assumes a potentially infinite bullet supply.
Wouldn't you already be dead after you got shot in the head by the first n bullets? And there's a limit to how many bullets can hit you simultaneously.
It's true. There must be a number of bullets n such that the n+1th bullet makes no contribution to your being dead.
How many times must a man be injured before you can call him a dead man?
51: shoot through the same hole as many times as you like.
53: I'm not coming on to you, Sifu.
I don't think official statistics on "Things you can die from" consider death by five bullets to the head as a distinct cause of death from death by six bullets to the head, even if all the bullets were genuine contributors. That all gets lumped together as death by bullets to the head.
Cardiac arrest is the only cause of death.
Cardiac arrest is the only cause of death.
Decapitate a mammal. Implant its heart into another mammal and keep it running. The original animal's heart never fails to pump blood normally for any significant amount of time. The original animal dies, and yet the cardiac never arrested.
I'm pretty sure that "cardiac arrest" means "cessation of blood flow due to lack of a functioning heart," and so removing an animal's heart is a way of inducing cardiac arrest.
And you're going to decapitate it too? What kind of sick scientist are you?
Wiki references Harrison's Principles of Internal Medicine for the assertion that it is "the cessation of normal circulation of the blood due to failure of the heart to contract effectively."
Now, if the heart is contracting effectively in another mammals thorax...
NPR said this morning that the Pakistani doctor who was recruited by the CIA to participate in the vaccination-clinic-under-false-pretenses is now under arrest in Pakistan under charges of, essentially, espionage (conspiring with foreign agents or words to that effect), the penalty for which would be death.
I see that the initial Guardian piece explains that as well.
As much as the public health ramifications of the fake-ish clinic are important, I'm finding this somewhat concerning as well.
The death penalty part is concerning, but arresting somebody who's suspected of we-can-actually-call-it-espionage on behalf of a foreign power is pretty standard stuff.
61: Yeah, I'd say so. It's beginning to look like the US really fucked up (or other descriptions of your choosing), and Pakistan is quite rightfully pissed. The Pakistani ambassador to the US sounds certainly to be pissed off, and not a fool, and not just about the bin Laden affair.
Cardiac arrest is the only cause of death.
If cardiac arrest is "the cessation of normal circulation of the blood due to failure of the heart to contract effectively", massive and rapid blood loss would seem to be a counterexample. The heart may not be able to effectively contract in the absence of blood in the arteries and veins, but the normal circulation of blood will already have ceased.
"Raymond the Wolf passed away in his sleep one night from natural causes; his heart stopped beating when the three men who slipped into his bedroom stuck knives through it."
The heart's contractions in the absence of blood can hardly be considered effective.
Hence "the heart may not be able to effectively contract in the absence of blood", teacher Tweety. However, the cessation of normal circulation of the blood will not have been due to that; it will have been due to the outpouring of blood from openings introduced to the body.
I think it is plain that the definition needs to be made much more careful. I nominate nowflow.
I thought lack of oxygen to the brain was the only cause of death.
Are we going to have to talk about what counts as death?
Medicolegal Investigation of Death claims that it is "irreversible cessation of circulation and respiration after modern efforts at resuscitation."
Are we going to have to talk about what counts as death?
That would seem to be an inevitable precondition for counting the number of things that can cause death.
I seem to remember learning that Guiteau's lawyers argued that the shot didn't kill Garfield, his subsequent treatment did. Garfield's doctors certainly did a bunch of things wrong, and like with McKinley, the consensus seems to be that with modern medical treatment - not just today's treatment, but even those of a few decades ago - he would have survived. Guiteau was sentenced to death. I guess it's a tough argument to make when your client really did shoot the guy.
Afghanistan and Pakistan have a very incidence of polio relative to much of the rest of the world (I think only India is higher), and they've both been major foci of polio eradication efforts in recent years. People I know who've been working in those efforts have told me that militant groups in Afghanistan and Pakistan were making these efforts very difficult and dangerous, precisely because they believed polio vaccination efforts were actually cover for CIA activity.
Eventually, aid organizations were able to convince their antagonists that polio eradication really was not a CIA plot, and they were all able to reach a shared understanding that allowed their aid workers to operate in safely in Afghanistan and northern Pakistan. Presumably, that shared understanding just ended.
This is seriously the kind of thing that could get a lot of aid workers killed.
49: I was interpreting "what we can die from" to mean what, if it were to happen, would cause one's death. Not the things that actually have happened or will happen that resulted or will result in death
50, 51: By the same logic it would be improper to say that someone died because a ton of bricks landed on them unless exactly a ton were required. If only half a ton would have done them in, you should say they died because half a ton of bricks landed on them, which was followed by a redundant half-ton of bricks.
55: So much the worse for official statistics.
The really important point here is that it ought to be:
"fake" modifies "clinic"
Otherwise the next step is human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, and eventually mass hysteria.
Oh yeah, self? What if it means that a fake (doctor, in being fake, thereby) modifies (the hitherto genuine) clinic?
I never realized that One of Many meant All Trapped In The Same Head.
Great - now we've blown our cover. If only there were some pigs we could shack up in.
YOU STAY RIGHT THE FUCK AWAY, YOU HEAR?
In support of those saying "still a big deal": http://afpak.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/07/13/the_hidden_perils_of_covert_action