Is it time to consider compulsory vaccinations?

Careful.Piracy is flourishing in 2015.That would make a hockey stick. We'd never hear the end of it.

Well thank goodness for that.When the Challenger space shuttle met her catastrophic end what was the thing that we didn't understand? We built the thing. How could we not understand it? What is it that we don't understand about the financial system? Brilliant people are brilliant but they are still people. Have you ever noticed what a soft touch those strawmen are? Is there anything that the professionals don't know about it? Would you ever question your mechanics diagnosis of your cars problem?The questioning of conventional wisdom always comes from a position of ignorance. It is the questioning that leads to the enlightenment. Surely, as a scientist you are not opposed to questioning the conventional wisdom. I know they are. They are agenda driven with obvious bias and opportunistic references so I can essentially dismiss them as a source of information. But it is not so comforting to read at the FDA site that they had little if any information regarding the toxicity of ethyl-mercury but got behind its removal just to be super ultra safe and not because there is any reason to think that mercury intake would be related to neurological problems. Anyway, my question about aluminium and neurological disorders was clearly a hypothetical one regarding the risk assessment involved in health care questions.If I question the use of mercury amalgams in my teeth this doesn't mean that I reject the wisdom of getting a cavity filled. If I question the idea of feeding my children formula instead of breast milk this doesn't mean that I question the idea of feeding my child. There was no reason to question the use of biopsies looking for prostate cancer until there was. I really couldn't care less about the righteous indignation of the medical community when the conventional wisdom is questioned.

Of course!But that's not even comparable. Cars change all the time; half of the changes made are made with little knowledge of how they might affect the overall integrity/reliability of the system. It's difficult for even the designers to stay current with all the possible failures on the machines they create, and almost impossible for a simple mechanic, who probably learned much of what he/she knows from experience, to be well schooled on the different 'updates' rolling off the factory floor every several months.In contrast, the human body has changed relatively little in several hundred thousand years (at least). It's entirely possible for us to learn more and more about it without much worry that something 'new' is going to pop up in a few months' time that completely alters the system and makes everything we knew obsolete.

It seems to me that this reasoning requires the mom on the sidewalk to also be at fault and that is just twisted.When bad things happen to me I always look to see what I could have done to avoid the problem. So if that accident happened to me then I would certainly feel some guilt about failing to avoid it but I wouldn't accept you telling me that I was to blame for mom's death nor would I ever attempt to assign that fault to anyone else apart from the guy who ran the light.

Dunning-Kruger is starting to raise its ugly head. Scientists are always testing the safety and efficacy of vaccines, and never assume that they are safe simply because they deem them so. The fact that you think someone without much knowledge of the science can read some stuff on an ill informed blog and overturn a field science is what some of us find problematic. An argument from ignorance is not a valid argument. Where did you get this idea?"Ethylmercury clears from blood with a half-life of about 18 days in adults. Ethylmercury is eliminated from the brain in about 14 days in infant monkeys. Risk assessment for effects on the nervous system have been made by extrapolating from dose-response relationships for methylmercury.[4]"
Ethylmercury - WikipediaThe danger of compounds that contain mercury is if they hang around in the body. Scientists know that ethylmercury is cleared quickly. Even more so, the mercury exposure caused by thimerosal in all vaccines during childhood is equal to a few cans of tuna. Are you as concerned about feeding your children tuna as you are of vaccines?

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"The Foole doth thinke he is wise, but the wiseman knowes himselfe to be a Foole"

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I think that you are right about this and so all you smart people need to be less confident so that I can increase my confidence in you. Believe it or not I find this to be problematic as well. Pretty unlikely that mom is going to find something that 50 yrs of study has missed but it is not impossible. If she should discover something that is not indicated in the literature you will be hard pressed to convince her that it is nothing. There is no amount of research that will absolve a mother who presides over some harm caused to her child.I guess the thing of it is that a personal experience carries a lot more weight than all the studies in the world. It is fairly disconcerting when you add tap water to your aquarium and it kills all of your fish. I got it from here.I know that they erred on the side of safety but my take away was that they hadn't studied it enough. But as you point out, what do I know. This is not sarcasm. I know that I don't know much about it and a big part of my problem is that I find it very difficult to determine which are the proper questions to ask and where to find reliable and pertinent answers. How do I calculate the risks if I should chose to think about it?On another note, I am currently enjoying an abscessed tooth. I went today to get some amoxicillin. After the relief provided by 1000mg those suckers could be 90% mercury for all I care.

You mean like stem cell research or quantum computing?add; or 3d printing at a molecular scale or nano tech or....Edited by ProtoTypical, : No reason given.

The question for me isn't really about the competence or integrity of the medical community even though there are some issues there. The question is how to determine risk. The one size fits all approach doesn't entirely hold up. Especially with regard to individual medical risks. What are the chances that my healthy kid gets hep b before they are a year old?

That is the why we use the scientific method. Our personal experiences do impact us more than cold data. Our emotions can and do shape our conclusions. The point of the scientific method is to remove this bias as much as we can.If a mother has her child vaccinated, and then the child develops autism, this will impact that mother very deeply, and can cause her to see associations that just aren't real. It may help to understand how scientists view it. Mercury intoxication has been heavily studied. While thimerosal may not have been specifically studied as much as other chemicals, the only know source of toxicity in thimerosal is the mercury portion of the molecule. Therefore, the toxicity of thimerosal is tied to how much mercury it puts in your body, and how long that mercury stays. As it turns out, the type of mercury, ethylmercury, found in thimerosal is naturally removed from the body in short order. Also, the total amount of mercury is comparable to foods you probably don't consider dangerous for children.Both the dose and long term presence of thimerosal are well understood as it relates to mercury toxicity.

As a bit of a detour, there has been interest in the evolution of cheating. If you think about it, cheating can be very advantageous. However, if everyone cheats then it is no longer advantageous.The same thing applies for vaccinations. If the non-vaccinated are the cheaters, what little advantage they get is based on the foundation of non-cheaters. If everyone cheats and does not get vaccinated, then cheating is no longer advantageous. It is an interesting intersection of game theory and evolution.

I wasn't talking about new discoveries. I was talking about changes to the system.The body we have is the body we have. It might be different in a million years or so... but we should still be able to keep up with it.

As I continue to study myself into increasing doubt I come across statements like

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Despite of that, as described above, levels of ethyl
mercury found 8 days after vaccination [33] leads to
50% inhibition of methionine synthetase (MS) in vitro
[13,30]. An earlier study using rabbits injected with
thimerosal containing radioactive mercury showed
that from hour 1 post injection to hour 6 the level of
radioactive mercury in the blood dropped over 75%
while from hour 2 post injection to hour 6 there were
singnificantly increased radioactivity levels in the fetal
brain, liver and kidney [81]. This latter study strongly
implies that a rapid drop in blood mercury levels from
thimerosal injection is due to uptake by other organs of
the body and not due to excretion. [30].

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Emphasis mine. sourceGiven how much we know about how mercury is bad for us it seems intuitively reasonable to avoid exposure. Why would we use it as a disinfectant/preservative if there are other options? How much of a role did economics play in that decision. Even if it made sense in 1931 does it makes sense today?There are plenty of good reasons to associate mercury with developmental disorders. I wonder if looking for a connection between the explosive rise in ASD rates and overall environmental load of mercury contamination is as ridiculous as looking for signs of correlation between pirate activity and climate change.In an effort to receive research funding I have come up with an acronym. R.I.S.C. This stands for Rumsfeldian Ignorance Syndrome Catastrophe. This is where the unknown unknowns cause one to drastically over react to the perception of a threat and cause even more harm. I suspect that 90% of the study will involve an investigation into how to calculate what % of total unknowns we don't know about with the remaining 10% looking at imagined conflicts of interest and self absolution.

Would it be fair to compare this to draft dodging? Those who choose to avoid service enjoy their continued existence because others are being delimbafied in their stead? If the peacenik disagrees with the idea of a war does that make him a cheater?

No. It would not.

Not much of an answer Jon.

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Argument from the fallacy of composition seems to be very appealing even though completely wrong. Systematically rejecting the fallacy of composition in social theory, perhaps especially in normative theory, has required several centuries, and invocation of the fallacy is still pervasive.

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sourceMust be a human thing. Maybe we could vaccinate against it.Here is a quote for you,

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Control is an illusion.

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Hannibal Lecter