Childhood Vaccinations – Necessary or Overkill? Sequal Thread

I was just going to post that same study.It was done in Denmark were I am from We have "socialized healthcare" and more than that we keep record of everything. The study looked at all Danish children born from 1991 to 1998, found exactly which children got the MMR vaccine (440,655) and those that didn't (nearly 100,000). Understand that they can identify all the children by a unique personal identifier. These numbers were then checked from a database of psyhiatric diagnoses containing all psychiatric diagnosis made in the Danish health care system. Again with the same unique identifiers, so that they could see if a specific child was diagnosed with autism.If the MMR vaccine had an impact on autism then you would expect to see a different pattern between the non vaccinated and the vaccinated. That is a larger proportion of the vaccinated children would show signs of autism.The study found no such difference in patterns. In other words, the risk of autism is the same with or without the MMR vaccine.I understand the fear. I am the father of a 7 months old boy, who has just gotten over a 3 day spell of fever as a sideeffect from a Pneumococcal vaccination, which has just been recommended as a standard vaccine given to children. This is a new recommendation in Denmark, and I studied the material very closely before taking him to the doctor. But I can't use anectdotal evidence when the health of my child is at stake, so I decided for the vaccine on account of it removing some risk for meningitis, and some sorts of pneumonia and laryngitis (it gives immunity to strains responsible for 75% of meningitis in children below age 4).So one one hand I have scientific studies of the vaccine, and on the other I have my father instinct, not wanting Nathan to have a fever now. To me the responsible choice is not my instinct but my reason.Edited by kongstad, : No reason given.

You havent noticed that every year millions of people get a cold, or get the flu? This is despite our superior state of cleanliness, and good nutrition.The thing is the diseases we vaccinate against spread just as easily as the common cold, but the effect is far worse, not only for the poor, young and old.Polio cripples a large part of the afflicted. The polio vaccine in one blow saves a lot of people. All of the other things we vaccinate against hold a cost greater than the cost of the vaccine.Like I said in another post the Danish government just started offering vaccination against pneumococ as a part of the vaccination program. This is estimated to prevent 50 serious cases of pneumonia, laryngitis or meningitis in children below the age of 5 each year, and save one child's life a year. The cost of the vaccine - besides the monetary - is that the cocktail of vaccines given at 3, 5 and 12 months will give a larger risk of adverse effects such as fever and vomiting in the child.It is a risk benefit analysis, and when studies show the benefits outweigh the risks, then it would be immoral not to vaccinate.As to long term effects, vaccination programs have been in effect for many decades now, with no ill effects observed, so I do not know what ill effect you are referring to? Any effect unknown at this time must be very small indeed or else we would see very clear difference in health patterns between vaccinated and unvaccinated people, which we don't (except that unvaccinated suffer from preventable diseases).This is really the bottom line. Like it or not the experiment with "30 jabs" has been going on for many years in millions and millions of children. So any cumulative ill effects would have materialized by now if there were any! The autism scare turned out to be a false alarm, so I fail to see what claim you have that vaccines are more dangerous than not vaccinating!

Well most of the population gets vaccinated, and the average life span just keeps getting better. Like I said IF there are any ill effects then they must by definition be very small indeed, since they have not shown themselves in any clear way.We can both agree that there is no link what so ever between autism and childhood vaccination, a link that has been examined and found wanting in many studies now.You are quite right that we cannot know there is no effect, but like you said as much as 1 in 1000 who get polio contract paralysis. An ill effect as large as that with childhood vaccination would have been caught decades ago, so just for this one patogen we are forced to conclude that the ill effects of not vaccinating are vastly more dangerous and widespread than any imagined or real ill effects from vaccination!An effect as large as paralysis from polio would have been discovered!

Yes but its a large proportion of the afflicted that are paralysed! 1/1000! And it is such a strong reaction!Now what is the evidence anything as strong as this happens for such a large proportion of vaccinated people?In Denmark were we keep very good records, since we have universal health care, we can track people on an individual basis.The paper I talked about earlier looked at 500,000 children born last century, with more than 400,000 of them being vaccinated. If they had ill effects affecting as much as 1/1000, then we should se 400 cases of these ill effects, just from this small slice of the population. In such a small country (~5 million) 400 cases is very noticable, and whatever the ill effects someone would look in to the medical history of the afflicted.Are you seriously arguing that such a large effect would go unnoticed? Yes a 1/1000 strong reaction would be very obvious, even if it wasn't immediate! I don't have the numbers but assuming the same ratio roughly applies for the total Danish population we have 4,000,000 vaccinated persons. That would be 4,000 cases of ill effects, somehow I have higher faith in the medical establishment if they are overlooking that many cases of ill effects worse than paralysis!

Exactly!I think it is healthy to remember that all drugs should have potential side effects, and this is because all drugs should have an effect!The word on the street is that the reason homeopathy got of to a good start was that it had no effect what so ever. The time it was introduced, much of the medicine and medical practice of the time had nothing but ille effects. No effect was better than an adverse effect.Time has changed however, and thanks to evidence based medicine we can now test cures for effectiveness.So we can safely say - its better to be vaccinated than to use homeopathy. It is better to be vaccinated than to get the disease in case of all the vaccines in the common childhood vaccination programs.What really bugs me is not that LindaLou dismisses evidence based medicine, but that she demands "further tests" of vaccines (most of which have been made), but she advocates submitting children to diseases without considering the long term effect of these, or even the short term effect.

If getting polio is better than being vaccinated then the ill effects of the vaccine must be worse than the ill effects of polio - can we not agree on this?You claim - without evidence - that there are long term ill effects of vaccine. If you mean this as an argument against vaccines then it can only be so if these effects are worse than the effects of polio. Can we not agree on this?Now one of the strong effects of polio is that it causes paralysis in as many as 1/1000.If vaccines are worse than getting the disease then more than 1/1000 should experience a side effect of the vaccine worse than paralysis.My claim is simply that such a large part of vaccinated persons gatting side effects as serious as paralysis would be extremely noticable!My claim is that any side effects must be either less serious or less frequent to have been undetected for so long! If you think it likely I would like to hear some argument for this position!

So if your GP does not have any evidence to base this statement on, why do you believe it, not to mention, why does your GP believe in it?Without knowing any reasons to believe a statement why should anyone believe in it?We sometimes accept statements form authority, because we cannot know everything, but if a GP says, this works, but there is no evidence that it works, then I'm sorry but that's just not an authority I would choose to believe in. Yes you do seem very entrenched. What I wonder, and I guess many others as well, is what made you so entrenched in your beliefs?Your argument seems to boil down to the fact that we cannot rule out with 100% certainty that there might just maybe be some downside to vaccinations.Well I know for sure that there are downsides to not being vaccinated, and I know there is no indication of any long term ill effects from vaccination. The minute someone shows vaccination is worse than no vaccination, then I'll reconsider.