KyroDoc said:"Being a skeptical soul, I have always believed that the
most reliable way to determine what people really believe
is to observe what they do, not what they say. If the
greatest threat of rubella is not to children, but to the
fetus yet unborn, pregnant women should be protected
against rubella by making certain that their obstetricians
won't give them the disease. Yet, in a California survey
reported in the Journal of the American Medical
Association, more than 90 percent of the obstetrician-
gynecologists refused to be vaccinated. If doctors
themselves are afraid of the vaccine, why on earth should
the law require that you and other parents allow them to
administer it to your kids?"--Dr Robert Mendelsohn MD
Is 90% statistically signifigant?
Actually the question "Is 90% statistically significant?" is
meaningless. I'll post the actual abstract that seems to be
referred to in this quotation and why don't you honestly
post whether you think this information from 1981 is of any
relevance to anything:
JAMA. 1981 Feb 20;245(7):711-3. Related Articles, Links
Rubella vaccine and susceptible hospital employees. Poor
physician participation.
Orenstein WA, Heseltine PN, LeGagnoux SJ, Portnoy B.
A serosurvey of 2,456 high-risk employees of the Los
Angeles County-University of Southern California Medical
Center showed that 345 (14%) were susceptible to rubella.
Of 197 seronegative personnel followed up for participation
in a vaccination program, 105 (53.3%) were vaccinated.
However, only one of the 11 known susceptible obstetrician-
gynecologists was vaccinated. Thirty-eight seronegative
employees who were vaccinated with RA 27/3 rubella vaccine
were queried four to six weeks after vaccination and
compared with 32 unvaccinated seropositive control
subjects. Although the reaction rate was 50% among
vaccinees and 3% among control subjects, each vaccinee lost
only an average of 0.2 workdays compared with 0.1 workdays
for control subjects. The high rate of susceptibility to
rubella among hospital employees supports the need for
screening. Although vaccine reactions are common, they are
generally mild. Means must be found to ensure greater
employee acceptance of vaccine.
PMID: 7463660 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]
So to ask this another way, do you believe it is significant
that in 1981 they could only get one out of eleven
obstetricians who had not already been vaccinated to show up
for vaccination.
Note that the above quote from Dr. Mendelsohn is a complete
distortion of what the study showed. It did not find that
more than 90& of obstetricians in California refused
vaccination. It dealt only with eleven obstetricians in
California who presumably had already neither been
vaccinated nor developed natural immunity to rubella.
--
David Rind [email hidden]
