When you don’t know anything about a topic but try to appear smart and knowledgeable, chances are you will lead to some real funny lapses. Following is a brief but potentially entertaining story.
This past week, a blog calling itself a Humanitarian Affairs Journal, made a fumble at promoting vaccines (as if isn’t promoted enough already). Lacking any focal point, the blog wanders between bits of statements by CDC, CNN, some vaccine-promoting docs etc., and intermixed with personal assumptions and claims. Things get interesting when the blogger gets to talk about polio.
The blogger writes that the oral polio vaccine (OPV) was “discontinued” in the U.S. in 2000 because it had a vaccine-derived poliovirus associated with it. Going on, the blog writes: Those who do not receive vaccines can acquire this type of “wild” polio type illness that has all the features of the one naturally occurring. WHAT! Did I just read what I think I did?
So the blogger in question is claiming that the virus derived from OPV is “wild” poliovirus and it causes polio similar to “naturally occurring” polio. After taking a moment to laugh at this self-made, babyish science, I felt it’s good to share with readers the point. Fact: wild poliovirus IS the one that occurs naturally. Vaccine-derived virus IS Not considered “wild” poliovirus. The basic definition is here (and everywhere else).
I wonder whether it was the blogger’s own “wild” imagination that went running out there in territories not familiar or just an over-charged spirit of humanitarianism for educating 100 billion people in one single, irrefutable (lols) write-up that led to this blog’s need to be. And it’s not worth my time to even comment on the rest of the clichéd, vaccine-promoting propaganda the blog in question has littered over the bit of web space it has wasted.
But the point made is, people who don’t know about science, or any discipline, and have life-long practiced rewording others’ statements without actually trying to read something in depth about the topic are virtually disabled in analyzing a topic in that discipline. And no matter how wild your blog goes, informed readers will know at what point to start taking it seriously.
