Childhood Vaccinations – Necessary or Overkill? Sequal Thread

LindaLou responds to me:

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Natural immunity is often lifelong.

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This is a nonsense statement, so vague as to be worthless. If you come down with pertussis, you are not immune for life.

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Many vaccines require booster shots

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That's because the immunity itself, no matter how it is acquired, is not permanent. The body doesn't know the difference between vaccine and infection. That's the entire point and it's why vaccination works in the first place: You trick the body into thinking it's infected so that it mounts an immune response.How does the body know that the surface protein it is reacting to isn't "real"? Especially since it's made from actual virus?

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I said there was a good chance you'd be dead,

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Define "good chance."

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Meaning childhood diseases were one of the leading causes of death before the development of vaccination. A diphtheria outbreak in the US killed 80% of all children under ten. Do you not understand what that means? It practically wiped out all the children. Part of the reason people had so many children in the 1800s is because they got sick and died.

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By my reckoning, there's a good chance that if I was well nourished and healthy, I would have recovered without any complications.

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Then why were infant mortality rates so high? "Malnutrition"? Explain why typhus spread through the wealthy community so quickly since they were the ones who had a good diet.

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u are actually proving my point that the dangers of these diseases have been hyped.

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80% of all children under 10 dead.Yeah...that's "hype."

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Not in the developed world.

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80% of all children under 10 in New England towns dead.Yeah..."couldn't happen here."

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How many of the people who were harmed were already compromised through malnutrition, ill health etc?

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(*blink!*)You did not just say that, did you? Rather than provide a safe and effective prevention for disease, we should abandon the people who are most in need of that prevention precisely because they are compromised? The poor don't have a good diet, LindaLou. They don't have access to good medical care. These are the people who are most in need of vaccination.80% of all children under 10 dead in New England, LindaLou. Now you tell me if we should have let them be develop a "natural" immunity. No, not from chickenpox. Don't be disingenuous.But if you become infected with chickenpox, you risk developing shingles later on because you never recover from chickenpox. If we vaccinate you against chickenpox, not only do you get protection from chickenpox but also from shingles.

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If you claim that the chicken pox vaccine is completely safe

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Where did I say that? I want a direct quotation, LindaLou.Every medical treatment has risks. But just because there is a risk doesn't mean that every risk is possible. Vaccination has no connection to autism. That doesn't mean there are no risks from vaccination...just that autism isn't one of them.

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I'd like to see some evidence, including a long-term epidemiological study.

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They've been done. Why haven't you looked them up? I asked you this directly and I really meant it:When was the last time you went to a science library and read a peer-reviewed journal?If you never have, what makes you think you are in any position to say anything regarding the state of the science? The fact that you are unaware of the studies is not sufficient. You need to step away from the computer, go to the library, and start reading the studies.

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Diphtheria has killed up to 80% of the children under 10 who contracted it.

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I cannot find this information. What is your source?

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You didn't bother to look, did you?Resurgence of Diphtheria
Artur M. Galazka, Susan E. Robertson, George P. Oblapenko
European Journal of Epidemiology, Vol. 11, No. 1 (Feb., 1995), pp. 95-105You're looking for the diphtheria outbreak in New England from 1735-1740.

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It is also my understanding that this disease occurs where there is poor sanitation, crowded living conditions, etc. Not a problem here.

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80% of all children under 10 dead, LindaLou.Yeah..."poor sanitation." "Crowded living conditions." This was 1700s New England.

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I believe the key to avoiding complications from diseases is to maintain a strong immune system.

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And that means getting vaccinated.

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What they caught was the strain of the virus that came from the vaccine

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Incorrect. They caught the wild polio. The Minnesota outbreak was traced back to Sabin-vaccine virus (which is why the US only uses the Salk vaccine), but the international incident created by the Amish polio epidemic was from wild type 1 polio.Did you even bother to look up the information?

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I would ask, myself, why this vaccine is still given.

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Because people still come down with polio. In a global community, all it takes is one person to cross a border on an airplane and you have a pandemic on your hands. While the sources of polio have been reduced to a handful of countries, it's still out there in the wild. Because there are outbreaks, it is still quite clear that we cannot consider it eradicated.Again, "herd immunity." That only works if the herd is mostly immune. We're not there yet.

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The smallpox vaccine was given for decades after its disappearance

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...because we didn't know if we had managed to get it all. While WHO certainly tried to get everybody, there was no way they were going to actually find every single human being on the planet.

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and during that time people contracted the strain from the vaccine too.

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No, they didn't. The smallpox vaccine is derived from cowpox. You can't catch smallpox from the vaccine because you aren't being given smallpox. Remember the history of how vaccination came into being? It was noticed that those who had come down with cowpox were immune from smallpox. Since cowpox isn't nearly as virulent as smallpox, the vaccination against smallpox uses the original concept: Administer cowpox antigen in order to prevent smallpox.You didn't do any actual research into this before responding, did you?

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Rrhain

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Thank you for your submission to Science. Your paper was reviewed by a jury of seventh graders so that they could look for balance and to allow them to make up their own minds. We are sorry to say that they found your paper "bogus," specifically describing the section on the laboratory work "boring." We regret that we will be unable to publish your work at this time.

LindaLou writes:

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A number of people have mentioned the eradication of diseases like this, and thanked vaccines.

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The only one this has been done for is smallpox, LindaLou. 300 million dead in the 20th century alone.

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I'd have to look up some info on each disease before I could comment knowledgeably.

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That hasn't stopped you before. Why are you hesitating now?

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If the disease were particularly virulent then I wouldn't object to vaccination. However, this overlooks other steps that can be taken, such as improvements in sanitation and nutrition.

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Right. Because 300 million people died from not eating their Wheaties.Explain why typhus spread through the wealthy community, LindaLou. They're the ones who had the "sanitation and nutrition," and yet they were the ones coming down with the disease.And the very people who are in greatest need of vaccination programs are those who don't have sanitation and nutrition, LindaLou. And the only way it really works is if EVERYBODY gets vaccinated. The best way to make sure nobody gets a disease is to eliminate it from the population. That means we have to make sure EVERYBODY gets vaccinated so that we don't have carriers.As I said before, your decision not to vaccinate doesn't affect just you. It affects everybody around you. By deliberately deciding to make yourself susceptible, you become a vector of infection for everybody you come in contact with.

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Rrhain

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Thank you for your submission to Science. Your paper was reviewed by a jury of seventh graders so that they could look for balance and to allow them to make up their own minds. We are sorry to say that they found your paper "bogus," specifically describing the section on the laboratory work "boring." We regret that we will be unable to publish your work at this time.

Well it must all be legitimate then, and totally unbiased. Especially when written by as objective a person as Dr. Randall Neustaedter renowned homeopathic doctor and author of 'The Vaccine Guide: Risks and Benefits for Children and Adults' and published in the prestigious Townsend letter: The examiner of alternative medicine.Your other article is by Gary Krasner the Director of the Coalition for informed choice whose stated purpose is to ... Does it mean much if you find an article on a 'not an anti-vac site' that agrees with anti-vac positions if it is taken straight from an anti-vac site and written by anti-vac advocates?I've not gone through the claims to look at them, I'm just pointing out that as independent verification of the claims this is pretty poor.TTFN,WKEdited by Wounded King, : Messed up tags

Yes, I edited my post to MBG when I looked up the credentials of Dr. Neustaedter. Do you have access to the article from JSTOR that I cited in Message 280?

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BTW the US may be gaining ground with life expectancy, but it still lags behind 40 other nations. Andorra, in the Pyrenees, has a life expectancy of 83.5 years. (More info here).

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And the reason is probably due to this: sourceAlso, Andorrans vaccinate an extremely high percentage of their population; well into the 90% range for most of the population for all but the third HepB vaccine booster, which is at 85%. sourceThis is what happens when you don't have herd immunity because people refuse vaccinations: source

Idea: Do not vaccinate children for rubella. Give adults the choice of a vaccine, including women of child bearing age, if by that point they have not been exposed to the virus.

"Eating your Wheeties." Yes. Well how do I explain the benefits of nutrition and supplements to someone who characterises them in this way.Diphtheria was on the decline before the vaccine. Typhoid also declined -- without a vaccine. Yes, in both cases, this was arguably due to more sanitary conditions. How sanitary do you think life in 18th century America was? How well-fed and healthy do you think those people were to begin with? I could give citations for the decline of diseases but it seems that the vaccination info sites I quote here are not acceptable evidence.How about this: it's an interesting debate chiefly about measles, mumps and rubella from 2005 in the British Medical Journal. People from around the world have contributed to it, and many of them give citations from mainstream journals. They discuss some similar issues to those here, but arguably many of them are more informed than any of us. It really is worth a read.

Lindalou, I will save a more detailed response to your latest hearsay post for the next generation of this thread.Wounded has already called BS on Dr. Neulander as an Antivax Hysteric, so I'd just like to add this:The cites from the "mainstream journals" of which you are so fond are from 1868, 1884, 1889, 1891, 1893, 1896, 1928, 1960, 1972, 1976, 1979.Of the 22 cites, only 2 are from 1990s.One of which has nothing to do with vaccines.Over half the cites are from the 19th century.I am not about the engage in a serious discussion of 140 year old cites.Your second link again has no cites.Until you provide evidence to the contrary, I am going to assume that Gary made all that shit up.Lindalou. In all seriousness, take a long hard look at the "evidence" you have offered time and again.Half the time they are more than likely fabrications as they provide no supporting cites from the relevant literature.The other half use cites that are anywhere from 100 to 40 years old.Find an Antivax Hysteric website that uses cites less than 40 y.o. then we'll talk.

You *do* realize, I hope, that the 18th century was the 1700s, which was two to three hundred years ago. Where are you getting your statistics for the decline of diphtheria and typhoid in the 1700s? Or the 1800s, for that matter.Perhaps someone mentioned 18th century statistics somewhere, if so I didn't notice it, but most of this discussion as been about advances in health in the 20th century. It isn't the statistics that are in question, LindaLou, but your conclusions, which are at odds with what we know about disease. Diseases that spread through unhealthy conditions, such as cholera, can be addressed through sanitation. Diseases that spread through human contact cannot. In the absence of vaccinations, halting the spread of such diseases requires quarantines and other public health measures. This is how disease incident rates were reduced before the widespread availability of vaccines. It was only after this that these diseases were for the most part eradicated in western countries.It is also important to discriminate between disease incident rates and death rates. Some of your anti-vax sites improperly use death rate statistics to argue that vaccinations produced little improvement, but declining death rates in the first half of the 20th century were due to improving medical care and increasing its availability. But reducing the mortality rate is not the same thing as reducing the incidence rate, and your sites often fail to make this distinction when talking about death rates.But most significantly, you have again failed to address any of the rebuttal. All you've done is repeat already-rebutted arguments and reassert your position. Rhain mentioned that smallpox killed 300 million in the 20th century, that typhus spread through wealthy communities where sanitation and nutrition was best, and that deciding against vaccination places society in general at risk. We already know your position. What we'd like to know is if you have any answers for all the numerous rebuttals.I think what everyone is most puzzled by is how you can distrust vaccinations despite the evidence of safety while trusting naturopathic alternatives in the absence of any comparable evidence of safety. Anything you take that can have a physiological effect on the body is a drug, and for the type of drugs you favor there is far less evidence of safety than for the drugs you reject.--Percy

The first article was talking about vaccination history. Surely it is appropriate to cite sources from the time.The Whale site has plenty of up-to-date studies. Here it talks about how the number of antibodies present in a person's system isn't always a reliable indicator of the degree of immunity. There are a couple of other cites but they are older. I've also seen similar discussions elsewhere.

Just one problem here Percy, and it's been a problem for me on other threads too. When I am more or less a lone voice and a number of people are debating with me, I find it difficult to keep up. People wonder why I'm not addressing some points but time is a factor. Just one person like MBG or Rrhain would be enough to keep me busy. But if it were just one person, I'd have more time to do better research. Sometimes yes, I've been guilty of throwing things out without checking them as thoroughly as I ought to.I stopped talking on the amalgam thread and if a new vaccine thread is started I will not go there. I'm tired and I want to talk about other things.

The answer to this hasn't changed. This is not a race. Take as much time as you need. No one cares if you don't reply to everybody, no one cares if you don't reply until next week, or even next month. Slow down and take you time or you'll burn yourself out. You keep saying things like this. Pace yourself, stress quality over quantity and speed. Address what people actually say and the animosity will probably also decline.You're frustrating many people because this doesn't feel like a rational discussion. Many rebuttals and counter-arguments are presented to you, and perhaps there are valid answers, but who knows, because all you do is keep reasserting your position while referencing the same poor data. It's as if you don't understand the rebuttals, or are just ignoring them, because anyone who read and understood them would quickly realize they have to take the discussion to a different plane and stop offering non sequitur responses.At heart this is not really a discussion about vaccination. It's really about how to think rationally and how we can be sure of what we know. From the point of view of most others on this thread, you're weighing bad evidence against good and judging them equal. It's crazy. Instead of a sequel vaccination thread, you need to participate in an epistemology or "nature of science" thread.--Percy

I'll leave it to others with the interest and remaining stamina to summarize the arguments for vaccination. For me this discussion was less about vaccination and more about problems not just with interpreting evidence, but more importantly with recognizing good evidence. Clearly, those unable to tell good evidence from bad have an easy time finding "evidence" for whatever it is they want to believe.For those who have some kind of innate trust of anecdotal data, it might help to think about how one might improve upon it. Let's say there's a website with a lot of personal testimony about experiences with child vaccinations and autism. One of the webmasters decides to see if a better case can be made against vaccinations by gathering more quantitative information, and so he starts a thread asking people to report the dates and types of vaccinations, and the date of diagnosis of autism.Even people who value anecdotal data would have to concede that adding the vaccination dates and types and diagnosis dates to the stories is superior to having just the stories. When one does this kind of thing, then one is taking a step toward being more scientific. Being more scientific gives one greater confidence in one's conclusions, not less. Taking a scientific approach is a good thing, not a bad thing. There are no "better ways of knowing" than the scientific method. Not that have yet been uncovered, anyway.So how does one go about selecting good evidence? For most laypeople, one doesn't. It is better to trust the experts, because it takes years of careful study to intelligently assess specialized evidence for oneself. But for those with a paranoid bent, then you have to learn the scientific method, and then you have to learn the specialized portions of that method that apply to the field of medicine. Only then can one recognize quality evidence, because those studies will have closely followed the best scientific protocols.This issue concerning recognition of quality evidence represents the bulk of the problems encountered in these recent threads. Those untrained and unfamiliar with science gravitate toward papers in fringe or even quack journals. Such papers are easier to understand, and their conclusions are almost always more boldly stated. But breakthroughs or new areas of productive inquiry have never begun this way. Quack ideas never make their way into the mainstream. In fact, one of the qualities of quack ideas that makes them easily recognizable is that they've been quack ideas for a long time. For some reason, quack ideas like homeopathy and ESP and ghosts and alien abductions and conspiracies remain appealing to the lay public. The public in general will only get smarter with great slowness and difficulty, especially here in the United States where we keep educating new generations of nincompoops.--Percy

LindaLou writes:

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How about this: it's an interesting debate chiefly about measles, mumps and rubella from 2005 in the British Medical Journal.

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Did you bother to read any of the entries, LindaLou? Since you're so big on anecdotal evidence, I suggest you read Deaf Like Me, the story of a mother who came down with German Measles (rubella) and because of that, her daughter was born deaf.Are you trying to tell us that there was a sanitary condition in the United States in 1964 that killed 11,000 unborn children? I understand the importance of a good diet, LindaLou. But diet and exercise won't stop you from getting sick and dying from infectious disease.Contrary to your claim, typhus spread through the wealthy community in this country...the community that had good nutrition and sanitation. So how is it that the epidemic struck them? Do you know the history of "Typhoid Mary"? Who she was and whom she worked for?Typhus was thought to be a "poor person's disease." It was those dirty, poor, malnourished people who got it.And then the wealthy started dropping like flies.Why didn't their nutrition and sanitation save them? And since there was no vaccine, the only possible response was quarantine, a truly horrendous process. That is what you're asking us to go back to, LindaLou.

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Rrhain

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Thank you for your submission to Science. Your paper was reviewed by a jury of seventh graders so that they could look for balance and to allow them to make up their own minds. We are sorry to say that they found your paper "bogus," specifically describing the section on the laboratory work "boring." We regret that we will be unable to publish your work at this time.

Quarantine was not something from just long long ago. Even when I was growing up it was normal to quarantine families where measles broke out. That also held true for things like polio, with pool closings and cancellations of any group activities.How soon we forget.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion