Please read the second comment under the story. This is really sad that in the names of ratings that the show would pander to misinformation. As the poster stated how did that work out for Laura Logan on 60 minutes�.

http://blogs.plos.org/thepanicvirus...-mongering-with-show-on-the-hpv-vaccine/

She's a dumb ass

Without fabricated misinformation, these people would have to actually report actual news... How could they pander to the pearl-clutchers with fact based news?

Oh dear - 3 steps forward then two steps back. Sadly you can't legislate against stupidity.

I don't follow Katie Couric, like all other celebrities too, but she had cancer herself, I think someone in her family passed as well from cancer, and hear Katie Couric advocates for cancer often, and even had a show on last year on different cancer survivors, including oral cancer, which day I was supposed to be in the studio audience, but the snow canceled our plans, so I don't know what this turn around is all about.

It was her husband who died of colon cancer, and the gastrointestinal research at New York Presbyterian Hospital is named in his honor. The TV episode I was referring had Dr. Marshall Posner, a head and neck specialist at Mount Sinai, who deals with HPV was on with an actress whose husband died of oral cancer.

Then she's a dumbass and frankly I have no patience for talk show hosts - they tend to sensationalize for ratings and generally pander to the gullible and uneducated masses. (before someone freaks out over the last comment - I do not mean that people are uneducated in general - I just mean on certain topics they are (if you're a mechanic - what do you know about brain surgery - unless you were forced by circumstances to learn?) Unfortunately, a lot of people believe that what they hear on TV is fact.

Well since we all agree, please comment on the shows web site today about what a disservice to the issue this is. Do it politely but firmly if you want it to not get cut. I think we need to be a voice against this kind of thing. Misinformation when allowed to prosper, only begets more misinformation. People are dying from our disease and the next generation has an opportunity never available before to side step ever getting an HPV cancer. She is undermining that. As a cancer advocate herself and one of the founding members of Stand Up 2 Cancer, this is really embarrassing. But comments to the show will get seen. State that you ante a cancer survivor, patient so that the comment has more weight than just something coming from the public.

Well, let's at least wait to see the show. Better to be fully informed before blasting away.

How disappointing, Katie Couric seems to have gone the way of what's good for the ratings. I've seen the story several times about the mother whose daughter died after receiving the vaccine. It's been getting a lot of attention by the anti Vac groups, when she could very well have died from other causes. All those who jump on that bandwagon do not seem interested in doing the research about the success that has occurred in other countries. The anti bad websites are more interested in selling their products than in staying with the truth. They will change parts of a story so as to slant it for their own purposes. Here are some sites that refute their claims:



Re Natural News and Mercola links:
http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4283
re Natural News and Mercola See #1 and #6

Re Sanevax:
http://forthesakeofscience.com/2011/09/08/how-shady-can-these-anti-vax-groups-get/
Refutes Sanevax position on Gardasil vaccination

Re VAERS (Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System):
http://quackwatch.com/search/webglimpse.cgi?ID=1&query=VAERS
How misconceptions about immunizations occur.
And OCF has some great links:

http://oralcancernews.org/wp/emergence-of-HPV-16-and-sexually-transmiitted-oral-cancer/
Sexually transmitted oral cancer

Spike in Oral Cancers Puzzles Experts
http://oralcancernews.org/wp/spike-in-oral-cancers-puzzles-experts/
Spike in Oral Cancers Puzzles Experts

http://www.oralcancerfoundation.org/HPV/
The oral cancer connection

Mathew Herper is one of the most respected medical tech writers out there. This is his column after the Katie Couric Show today

http://www.forbes.com/sites/matthew...ouric-stacked-the-deck-against-gardasil/

And as to putting up anything on Katie's site, don't bother, the comments thread (1000's of them) has brought out all the tinfoil hats anti vaccination people. I must say that after watching the show that I am particularly disappointed in a woman who has been a cancer advocate after her husband died, has been a core part of starting and funding quality organizations related to colon cancer, and is part of the Stand Up 2 Cancer effort that OCF is a strategic partner to. All I can say is that given that history, I feel betrayed right now. She doesn't need a ratings boost. This was a completely unnecessary, self inflicted wound to her credibility as an advocate.

Great article! I posted it on my FB page and expressed my disappointment in her lack of attention to facts. Ms. C. probably does not have a wrecking ball and has to use this way of getting attention and increase ratings.

Than you Brian, well put. They should have had some HPV cancer patients on the show.

Two more critics of the show write for Slate:

http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_facto..._journalist_throws_in_with_the_anti.html

and

http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astr...false_balance_to_dangerous_quackery.html

Disappointing and disgusting!

After watching the recording of the show today, it is about what I expected and par for the course. As a TV talk/variety/entertainment show it's primary goal is to bring eyeballs to the show, so liberal strokes of drama and bias are applied as necessary to juice up the topic.

After filtering out all the TV fluff, the message of both medical experts was do your research and consult with the doctor, then make your decision. One did state her opinion for the shots while the other was more oblique but clearly implied it was difficult to recommend getting the series due to the "risks".

The two stories offered the obligatory balance, one side clearly working the emotional/empathy angle.

The fatal flaw for me was comparing a pap smear test, a diagnostic procedure, with a targeted preventative vaccination, destroying any remaining credibility.

So what if the show throws the anti vaccine crowd a bone? If you are in that camp then there would be very little to convert any in that crowd anyway. If not, I just hope viewers listened to the common advice to research and seek the doctor's expertise then take a position and decision. But in this day of 5 minute video clips and void of critical thinking, it is sad the majority will likely take away the HPV virus is something to be avoided.

Very sad,
Don

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/katie-couric-show-on-HPV-vaccine-sparks-backlash/

All just indicative of the state of our media today. Who cares about facts? Man, you read some of the comments on those article links and you realize that we haven't come very far from the Dark Ages.

At least some of us do care about the facts. See Joanne Bamberger's column in today's USA today:

http://www.usatoday.com/story/opini...ccine-hpv-jenny-mccarthy-column/3884785/

And the story about Katie's misstep with her producer continue to come out

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/...wider-scientific-illiteracy?detail=email

What a powerful story in the Dailykos! Love the reference to journalism schools and whether they teach statistics or how to tell evidence from coincidence. Reminds me of a class in Logic I took years ago. How these stories continue to come en masse. Maybe they will serve to pry open the eyes of some of the anti-vax groups.

The syndicated TV show "The Doctors" is broadcasting a segment today (check your local listings for time/station) in which two sisters, ages 19 and 20, are saying that Gardasil caused premature ovarian failure and left them infertile. More details on their claims here (article is from early November).

Great! Let the anti-vaccine ball build even more momentum. This should be a no-brainer to get immunized. Here in the land of choice, and everyone being entitled to their own opinion it saddens me to see this anti-vaccine push for the Guardisil shot.

Oh well, two steps forward and one step back happens with just about everything in life. Charm would be having a stroke over this.

Christine,
You are right, indeed!

Thanks for the smile as I thought about Charm .

The entire anti-vaccination movement needs to be viewed for what it is - BS and kooks! And you know there is no sense wasting time trying to have a rational conversation with them, so don't waste any time and energy on them. Keep the focus on educating those that subscribe to a science based approach to medical diagnosis and treatment.

Maybe I'm just a never-give-up type (and sometimes to a fault), but as I see it, those that are advocating the anti-vaccination movement like Mercola, Natural News, Sanevax, VAERS are doing it to promote their own agenda or product sales. They do it by changing or leaving out info to make their own version of "research" what they want it to be and they play on people's emotions, in order to accomplish this. When anyone is advocating something that is downright dangerous to one's health and life, especially any organization or individual that is in it for their own financial gain, or other advantage, they need to be exposed for what they are doing. If enough people or organizations take the time to do this, maybe the blindly following sheep will begin to see that they need to do their own checking. The FDA has ordered Mercola and its coalition members to stop making illegal claims. Others like Quackwatch and Skeptoid have also found it important enough to expose the anti-vax quacks. If they can do it, I can too and I will - every chance I get. I don't want anyone (not even the "kooks") to have to go through what my son did in surviving his oral cancer. I don't want any other mother to have the fear of losing her child or to see him (or her) suffer the unbearable torture that comes with surviving oral cancer.

"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing". This has been attributed to Edmund Burke, who actually never said this exact phrase, and has even been rewritten more succinctly as in "Evil only prospers when good men do nothing."

But in our modern world of the Internet, it carries a different meaning than when originally penned 200 years ago. Myth, misinformation, half-truths, outright lies, permeate the online information world. For the most part we all ignore most of nonsense that is out there; but what if someone less informed, less analytical, comes across an answer to an important question that is one of these fabrications?

In some instances, as pointed out by several of the high profile commentators of what occurred on this TV show, there is the potential for people to be hurt, even die. I disagree with Don respectfully. To allow this kind of misinformation to live is dangerous. We all know all to well, in our roles as cancer patients, caregivers, and survivors what the cost of all this might be.

While I agree that you likely cannot change the mind of a fanatic, it is important that the argument for the facts, the truth, be fought. Not necessarily in the comments threads after some article, those are the kinds of no-win situations that do not really change the dynamic. But every opportunity we are afforded to state the risks, to state what we know is backed by scientific evidence, to tell our stories of harm from this virus, of a battle with cancer that had we been vaccinated might not have been fought - we need to keep that quality information out in the world. To do nothing only allows this cancer of misinformation and innuendo to survive and prosper.

Great comments.

[quote]they need to be exposed for what they are doing.[/quote]
[quote]To allow this kind of misinformation to live is dangerous.[/quote]

What follows is more from the head rather than the heart.

If the overarching goal is to achieve awareness of the vaccine and convey the positives, then, given limited resources, strategies and tactics to accomplish this goal are defined and executed.

A few guiding principles:

1) limited resources,
2) achieve the greatest progress with the fewest resources,
3) understand success is less than 100% (population of target age) getting the vaccine,
4) existential threats will be defined and resources applied as necessary.

Number one is pretty obvious and especially relevant to specialty causes such as this. Given number one, getting the most progress with limited resources is critical. The common saying, "achieve 80% of the goal with 20% of the resources" means get all the low hanging fruit knowing some at the very top are left behind as too costly to retrieve. Number four means even if one of the fruits at the top of the tree can infect the whole tree and kill it, you must apply whatever resource you can apply to go get that one at the top.

I've not spent any time looking into the variations from this standard model as it applies to promoting and educating a potential lifesaving medical vaccine and certainly there are nuances requiring some adjustment of the basic business model to address this issue. I KNOW Brian thinks about this everyday, so I'd love to hear his take.

I'd love to hammer, stomp out, and totally discredit every false and misleading message just as much as you. But we are in the Internet and hyper mass media age and information flow is so accessible to all, it is impossible to stop all negative messaging.

If the Katie interview was deemed so detrimental to the cause then you may be obligated to address it head on and expend resources, maybe all of it, to go to war.

One would expect companies producing and profiting from the vaccine have more to gain if they can prevent the false messaging creating confusion in the market. The fact interviews like the Katie show go on indicates to me it is a battle they chose not to fight for whatever reason. With a battery of legal force at their disposal, it would not take much to file some action to disrupt the airing of that episode. Why they don't shut this nonsense down forces one to dig deeper. It it would provide a better balance between heart and mind.

Great dialog, don

Katies show, catastrophe that it was, is our first amendment rights in play. Everyone is entitled to have their opinion. So this is less on the mothers that are looking for a reason why something horrible happened that they can blame, and more about someone who has the key to the bully pulpit giving that person a venue to spread misinformation. This is an issue of someone with the opportunity to move the ball down the field in a positive way choosing to do something that moved it backwards.

This is a particularly difficult situation for me, as OCF is a proud strategic partner to Stand Up 2 Cancer, and Katie is a founder of that organization. EIF the parent organization behind SU2C is also OCF's largest donor every year, (through the involvement of Gwyneth Paltrow), so in the middle of all this I am walking a razor's edge of being angry, and not biting the hand that feeds me. OCF has a dream team (HPV) application in front of SU2C, that I have 6 months invested into putting together.

So what can we do?

Spreading the word through our friends and family can only do so much.

Unfortunately not all who watched the show will read this but it is hitting the web

http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/people/2013/12/10/katie-couric-HPV-segment-apology/3958423/

Well, it's nice that she apologized. I hope it's not just a case of doing something dumb because you can always apologize for it later if you get caught.

Merely apologizing is not enough. If your friend lends you his car and you wreck it, "sorry" does not fix the damage, your have to either repair the damage or get him another one.

If it's really critical to her that people know the facts, then she at least try to repair some of the damage she caused by putting knowledgeable people on her show who can set the record straight. Just my two cents.

Brian,

The other side to the 1st Amendment is the responsibility of the recipient of what is being communicated to apply filters based on their own set of knowledge, experience, intuition, culture, values, etc.

I firmly believe the vast majority of people in our culture today accept short sound bites, tweets, email blurbs, etc. as some form of truth and fail to apply sufficient filters and just let this stuff sync into the psyche where it becomes "truth".

It is understandable but not excusable that people do not maintain a stronger filter shield to avoid all the nonsense that gets blown onto the public.

As to Katie Couric specifically, she is a has been and the sinking ship of a show she is on is going under end of season and she is jumping ship to Yahoo, really? Boy, now that is a forward career step if there every was one.

To be fair, what appears to have happened is she wanted to bring harder news stories to the show but the bosses wanted softer and more variety themed stories for that time slot.

As Forest Gump so eloquently put it, "Stupid is as stupid does".

I have heard that on Friday she is going to have the head vaccine person from the CDC on her show� Clearly all the partial mea culpas so far have not quelled the rough seas. Let's see if this is a redeeming moment or not. Bottom line the damage is done. The odds that viewers of that bad segment will watch a correcting segment are only so so unless they are everyday viewers. But clearly the pressure to do more has been applied either with or without Katie's input. Please note that they have not put out any publicity about Friday's subject matter or guest.

[quote]Please note that they have not put out any publicity about Friday's subject matter or guest.[/quote]When has the media ever made corrections anywhere else on the last page of the newspaper days or weeks later or put on as the last item in a televised program.

As you say even a full mea culpa will not take back the impressions left on those who watch the first segment. There are going to be those who happen upon the second show and view the retraction, correction, or whatever it may be. Does it balance out, who knows? What if the second segment has greater viewers? Does that mean more people listen to the benefits? Does this overcome the damage done by the first segment, who knows? We all know that the answer is we will never know.

At least there were enough feathers ruffled and hens cackling to force the network to review the topic. Maybe one could interpret this shows there is quite a bit of awareness and support for the vaccine.

Gotta run and set the DVR!

Bye, Don

The only publicity I've seen about today's show did not include any interview with anyone from CDC.

Maybe now that Katie is back peddling it will actually help with your work that you have in front of SU2C. It shows it is even more important to get correct information out there!

The segment, toward the end of the show, was pegged as part of regularly scheduled Friday follow-ups to recent shows that sparked viewer feedback. "Very few shows have generated as much reaction" as the HPV show, Katie said, so "I want to make sure we all understand the facts about this vaccine and the human papillomavirus."

Katie spent more than six minutes (an eternity in television time) interviewing Dr. Anne Schuchat, the director of the CDC's National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, who discussed facts about HPV, and the vaccine, that should have been included in the first program.

You can view the Schuchat segment here. Note that the anti-vaccination folks are out in force in the comment thread, and the text below the Schuchat video seems to me to be weighted toward the anti-vax view.

Thanks Leslie,

I forgot to record the program but caught it via your link. As you say, it was far more than a ten second mea culpa and the interview with the head of vaccinations at CDC is about as credible a talking head as there is.

There are over 2,500 comments - I scanned a few, many mis and under informed commenters. There is no hope for those who question the safety and efficacy of drugs that make it through all the trials and finally get FDA approval.

Thanks
Don

We do need to continue to spread awareness and information in every way possible - friends, family, social media, awareness walks, sharing OCF info with your dentist or doctor, etc., but in a way that will not offend nor irritate those those who are reluctant to accept new information. They may have been emotionally influenced by a constant barrage of mis-information (a.k.a "brainwashing") and it may take a while for new stuff to sink in. Irritating them will only make them sink deeper into the cesspool of misinformation. You cannot "make" someone do or think something they are incapable or unwilling to do. And some just get confused with facts. So it's better to play nice.

Reading the trolls comments and ignorance of facts is disheartening. But it really doesn't matter what the conversation is about, the Internet has allow and facilitated not only the spread of good information but a place for those with skewed information, or hidden agendas to also become quite vocal. The screen name allows anyone to hide behind it and that is also part of the problem, people will say things they might not without the anonymity. The other issue is that on the internet the loudest and most persistent voices get the majority of the space, not the most knowledgable or educated ones.

This environment isn't going to change. All we can do is tell our stories, and put out good information in a non pushy way when we have the opportunity. It's a sad observation on the situation, but it is the same in politics or any other subject of controversy. Our fight goes on for science based information that will help people avoid our disease.

News is out she was dropped by ABC

I read that in today's LA Times as well, Brian. Such a shame....