The first time I read Turtles All The Way Down, I had a hard time understanding why anti-vaccine folks have been so excited about it.
And then I realized that there was a much different, newer version of Turtles All The Way Down with an anonymous author and edited by Mary Holland.
The Turtles All The Way Down Anti-Vaccine Book
Why anonymous?
Well, it's hard to believe anyone would want to put their real name on this book...
"With that, I challenge every physician and scientist to read Turtles All the Way Down: Vaccine Science and Myth and make your best effort to shoot holes in the arguments it makes."
Turtles All The Way Down: Vaccine Science and Myth
So what does Turtles All The Way Down get wrong?
For one thing, they get their whole Matrix metaphor wrong.
"There are two possible answers to the central question in this book. If the answer is the one you’d expect, that vaccine authorities are right, you will just go on with your week somewhat better informed. If, on the other hand, the answer is that the parents are right, the earth beneath your feet may start to tremble."
Turtles All The Way Down: Vaccine Science and Myth
Instead of waking these folks up, they are sending them to a Wonderland of conspiracy theories and misinformation about vaccines.
The First Five Errors in Turtles All The Way Down
Now, let's see about that challenge...
"Had vaccines been perceived as completely safe, like health authorities claim, the animated public debate about them would never have gained traction."
Turtles All The Way Down: Vaccine Science and Myth
Yeah, so no one says that vaccines are completely safe.
"A vaccine with side effects that are mild and transient, that only causes serious or permanent damage extremely rarely (the proverbial “one in a million”), is unlikely to make any parent climb a virtual soapbox and preach to the cyber masses – even if its efficacy is less than ideal."
Turtles All The Way Down: Vaccine Science and Myth
The thing is, the types of serious side effects they are talking about here are the kind that have been shown to not be caused by vaccines. You have to remember that many of these folks think that vaccines cause everything from food allergies and ADHD to SIDS and autism. They are on a soapbox because they have been made to think that everything is a vaccine injury.
"Any temporal association between vaccine administration and subsequent deterioration in health is merely an unfortunate coincidence."
Turtles All The Way Down: Vaccine Science and Myth
And they are made to believe that anything and everything that happens after their child has received a vaccine must be caused by that vaccine, even if it is weeks, months, or years later.
This is despite the fact that studies often shown that there is no causal relationship between the symptom or condition and the vaccine.
"Even today, approximately 150 years after it first appeared, the story of the scientist, the elderly woman, and the turtles remains quite popular in scientific circles."
Turtles All The Way Down: Vaccine Science and Myth
Popular enough for some folks to know that although the story is often associated to a story in a 1959 book by Bertrand Russell, it's been around for far longer, and is an attempt to explain the world turtle myth.
So what do the turtles all the way down represent in this book?
They seem to represent the infinite number of myths about vaccines and infinite number ways these folks have come up to scare people away from vaccinating and protecting their kids!
Consider their chapter on placebos - they dismiss all of the vaccines they list and say they weren't tested with saline placebos because they weren't among the latest trials they wanted to highlight. But consider that if other vaccines were tested with saline placebos and shown to be safe (and they were), then that demolishes the whole idea they are basically pushing - that no vaccines are ever safe.
The worst argument in the book has to be the part where they dismiss the fact that vaccines work though.
"Historical evidence uncovered in the second half of the 20th century shows, clearly and unequivocally, that the narrative of “life-saving vaccines” is largely fictitious."
Turtles All The Way Down: Vaccine Science and Myth
To try and make their argument they print mortality data charts, something we see over and over again on anti-vaccine sites.
Mortality data charts that they use to hide the simple fact that thousands of people, mostly children, were still dying of these diseases in the pre-vaccine era, before vaccines were finally introduced to get them under control.
"But is polio really an infectious and contagious disease?"
Turtles All The Way Down: Vaccine Science and Myth
The book even claims that polio was caused by DDT and other pesticides, something we have also seen many times before!
They dismiss the theory that improved hygiene and sanitation were the reason we began to see outbreaks of paralytic polio in the 20th century because Albert Sabin had "found that the level of poliovirus antibodies in infants aged 6–12 months was very low not only in the US, but also in countries where no polio outbreaks had ever been recorded (Japan, Korea) and in countries where sanitation and hygiene were particularly poor (Egypt)."
But those weren't Sabin's conclusions...
"The data, which I have assembled here, by no means all that are available, are intended to show that, with due regard for differences in recognition and reporting, the paralytic consequences of poliomyelitis infection are not the same in different parts of the world or even in different population groups living in the same part of the world."
Paralytic Consequences of Poliomyelitis Infection in Different Parts of the World and in Different Population Groups
In his lecture - it wasn't a study - Sabin suggested many theories for why they were seeing polio epidemics, from increased genetic susceptibility to more virulent strains. He couldn't yet prove that polio was a disease of development though.
Fortunately, research on the topic didn't stop in 1951, as the Turtles folks seem to think (anti-vaccine propaganda all the way down)!
"Serologic surveys, particularly those conducted by Paul and his associates (2, 6, 7), clearly showed that poliovirus infections were ubiquitous in the populations of developing countries where only infrequent sporadic cases of paralytic disease were seen (figure 2)."
The Epidemiology of Poliomyelitis: Enigmas Surrounding Its Appearance, Epidemicity, and Disappearance
There actually is serologic evidence to support why kids in developing countries didn't get paralytic polio because they already had immunity at an early age, with protection from serious disease because of their maternal antibodies.
How those polio epidemics came about has even been worked out mathematically.
"We present a simple age-class model that explains this ‘‘disease of development’’ as a threshold phenomenon. Epidemics arise when improved conditions in hygiene are able to reduce disease transmission of polio amongst children below a critical threshold level. This generates a large susceptible adult population in which, under appropriate conditions, epidemics can propagate."
Modeling polio as a disease of development
And since most of this was done long ago, it is surprising that none of this is mention in Turtles All The Way Down.
"Changes in polio transmission resulted in an increase in the average age
of acquisition, which in turn drove changes in polio epidemiology through-
out the twentieth century. In this paper, we documented the twentieth-
century evolution of polio mortality by sex, race and age; these patterns are
best explained by the hygiene hypothesis."Unraveling the Social Ecology of Polio
Or perhaps it's not, as they do a lot of cherry picking of studies to push their agenda - that vaccines are dangerous, don't work, and aren't necessary (anti-vaccine propaganda all the way down).
The rest of the book is much of the same. It is made up of what we call PRATTS or anti-vaccine talking points refuted a thousand times.
Turtles All The Way Down is just another anti-vaccine book filled with misinformation to scare parents away from getting vaccinated and protected.
More on Anti-Vaccine Propaganda
- More Questions to Help You Become a Vaccine Skeptic
- Were Anti-Vaxxers Proven Right?
- Polio on TV and the Movies
- The First Five Errors in the Moth in the Iron Lung Book
- Are Vaccines Tested Together?
- Are There Any Long-Term Studies On Vaccine Safety?
- Where are the Double Blind Placebo Controlled Randomized Trials about Vaccines
- “Turtles All the Way Down” repeats anti-vaccine misinformation
- The Grand Debunk of the antivaxxer book “Turtles All the Way Down” (part 1/10)
- The Grand Debunk of the antivaxxer book “Turtles All the Way Down” (part 2/10)
- The Grand Debunk of the antivaxxer book “Turtles All the Way Down (part 3/10)
- The Grand Debunk of the antivaxxer book “Turtles All the Way Down (part 4/10)
- The Grand Debunk of the antivaxxer book “Turtles All the Way Down” (part 5/10)
- The Grand Debunk of the antivaxxer book Turtles all the way Down (part 6/10)
- The Grand Debunk of the antivaxxer book Turtles all the way Down (part 7/10)
- The Grand Debunk of the antivaxxer book Turtles all the way Down (part 8/10)
- The Grand Debunk of the antivaxxer book Turtles all the way Down (part 9/10)
- The Grand Debunk of the antivaxxer book Turtles all the way Down (part 10/10)
- Paralytic Consequences of Poliomyelitis Infection in Different Parts of the World and in Different Population Groups
- Modeling polio as a disease of development
- The Epidemiology of Poliomyelitis: Enigmas Surrounding Its Appearance, Epidemicity, and Disappearance
- From Emergence to Eradication: The Epidemiology of Poliomyelitis Deconstructed
- A survey of poliomyelitis virus antibodies in French Morocco
- Unraveling the Social Ecology of Polio
- Understanding the Polio Epidemic through the SIR Model
- HPV vaccine fear mongering in an anti-vax book – a critical review
- Various childhood vaccines have been tested in saline placebo-controlled randomized trials, contrary to claims by those opposed to vaccination
