Photo Credit: Yael Beri via Flicker
The other day, as I was catching up on my vaccines Google Alert, I ran across a blog entry titled The Worst Things People Say About Unvaccinated Kids over at a website called Babble. In this article, the author lists what she considers to be the 5 worst things other people, presumably parents of vaccinated children, say about unvaccinated children, and she provides rebuttals to these assertions.
I am a bit torn about how to properly respond to this entry, as there is some truth to what the author says. For example , she points out that being told that ” I’m a bad parent, I will not be persuaded to see things your way.” This is true. Most parents who have chosen not to vaccinate their kids, whom I have had a chance to have any sort of meaningful interaction with, are not bad parents, but precisely the opposite is true. It is out of what they consider justified caution that they choose not to vaccinate. They are wrong in their analysis of the pros and cons of vaccines, but that does no make them bad parents. And, if your goal is to persuade them to analyze the issue properly, offending them by calling them stupid, idiots, or bad parents is not the way to go. Everyone makes wrong decisions, you and I included. So a little bit of civility and giving the other person the benefit of the doubt is called for, I think.
Having said that, let us look at her list in detail, as these thoughts, in my opinion, are something that a lot of anti-vaccine parents share.
1) “You better keep your unvaccinated kid away from mine because I don’t want mine to get sick!” — You do realize that in order for my child to get yours sick, my child would have to…actually be sick? In that regard, only children who are actually ill can pass along illness. It does not matter if a child was vaccinated or not, if a child is sick, then the child can pass along the illness. Unvaccinated children aren’t magical disease-carriers. In fact, many are rarely sick. If they are, they’ll stay home! It’s just not a good argument, because anyone *can* catch an illness, and unvaccinated kids aren’t extra-special in this regard, especially not when it comes to general mingling with society.
If they are sick, they’ll stay home! Simply put that’s a bit naive. Whooping cough looks just like a simple cold in the beginning, and severe symptoms don’t start until 10-12 days after. How many parents will immediately isolate their children just because they have a bit of cough? The answer is: not many. In the mean time, these kids are contagious, and commingling with other children, way before the symptoms get severe enough, and way before a diagnosis of whooping cough is made. A person sick with measles is contagious 4 days before the typical measles rash appears. Measles typically starts as a mild illness with a runny nose and mild temperature. It is simply not true that parents immediately isolate their child the moment she has a runny nose, or a sore throat. Again, sick children are very likely to be contagious and in contact with other children, way before the sickness is evident, or severe enough, for them to be kept home.
It is a fact that vaccines are very good at protecting against infectious disease. It is a fact that a vaccinated person has much lower chances than an unvaccinated person of catching the disease they were vaccinated against. It is a fact that unvaccinated people are much more likely, by orders of magnitude I would say, to catch and spread a disease. One need look no further than the recent measles outbreaks in the U.S. which were mostly traced back to unvaccinated people, even though, if you look at the population as a whole, the people unvaccinated against measles make up only a small portion.
The Minnesota measles outbreak affected 21 people at least, of which at least 17 cases were directly related to the one unvaccinated child who imported the disease from overseas. That’s over 85% of the outbreak directly related to the one unvaccinated child, if you count the unvaccinated child too.
Saying that unvaccinated children are just as harmless as vaccinated children is clearly wrong. Yes everyone *can* catch an illness, but the chances vary widely. Anyone *can* catch HIV, however a person who has unsafe sex, shares needles etc its at a much higher risk than a person who doesn’t. The author is missing this crucial distinction, in an effort I think to avoid facing the responsibility that the choice not to vaccinate one’s child carries. You can choose not to vaccinate, but you cannot rid yourself of the responsibility that your choice carries.
2) “But the greater good…!” — Nope. If there’s something out there that’s “for the greater good” and promises absolutely no harm to my child, guaranteed, sure, I’ll do it. But vaccines come with their own set of risks, and parents must be willing to accept them. And since unvaccinated kids aren’t disease-carriers (see point #1), it really isn’t that big a deal anyway.
This is a classic anti-vaccine point. There’s so many assumptions going into making this statement that I cannot possibly address them all in this entry. First, let’s say that at the very least the author expresses a complete disregard for other human beings, a complete disregard for children that cannot get vaccinated because of medical issues, who have to rely on other kids being vaccinated for limited protection. This sort of selfish attitude is not completely illogical however, but when taking into account the benefit to the child herself first, and the rest of society second, it is illogical, not to say a bit hypocritical, considering that, knowingly or not, the anti-vaccine parent herself is relying on herd immunity, or “the greater good”, to protect her child.
Secondly, she demands that she’ll only consider doing something for the greater good if it is absolutely, 100% harmless to her child, which is not unreasonable either. I will not harm my child to save another, and we cannot ask that parents put their children in harm’s way for the sake of others. The interesting thing here is that by not vaccinating her child, she is putting her at greater risk than the small vaccine risks which she demands to be zero. This is classic tunnel vision, missing the proverbial forest for a tree.
We do not ask that children be vaccinated solely to protect others, and it would be wrong if that was the case.We ask that children be vaccinated so, first and foremost, they would be protected. Any benefits to society are secondary, but are not in and off themselves a good enough reason to demand vaccination of a child. If a parent cannot be persuaded to vaccinate their child for the child’s sake, this sort of “greater good” argument stands no chance. Although, to be sure, as long as I’ve been interested in this issue I’ve not come across the demand that parents ought to vaccinate their children solely for the purpose of protecting others.
3) “Your child will die of the measles or another preventable illness!” — Highly unlikely, and not because of vaccines! Let’s suppose my child does catch the measles. The primary reason for complications/death from measles, according to the WHO, is vitamin A deficiency. In fact, the WHO recommends immediate vitamin A supplementation in areas where children frequently catch measles and aren’t vaccinated. My children aren’t deficient in vitamin A, and if they were, could easily be supplemented. Knowing the position of the WHO and why people do die in third-world countries eases my mind, because that is just not an issue here. (Along with poor nutrition and sanitation causing complications, also not an issue here.)
This is otherwise known as burying your head in the sand and refusing to acknowledge statistics. Even in developed countries such as the U.S. about one out of 1,000 children with measles will get encephalitis (a dangerous inflammation of the brain), and one or two out of 1,000 will die. To put that into perspective, if 1,000 children of parents that think along the lines of the author were to catch measles, 1 or 2 pairs of those parents would find out the hard way, how wrong their simple, two-line analysis was. Just recently I posted a video of just such a parent.
Measles is highly contagious. 90% of children with no immunity will get sick if exposed. On the flip side, the MMR vaccine is 95% effective at preventing measles. Saying that vaccines do not dramatically reduce the risk of catching measles is simply ignorant of the facts.
I am glad she chooses to rely on a WHO position paper, as the WHO is a reliable source. However, she makes the classic mistake of “cherry picking” as in the same paper, the WHO clearly states that:
Measles is an extremely contagious viral disease that, before the widespread use of measles vaccine, affected almost every child in the world.
This directly contradicts her first sentence.
High-risk groups for measles complications include infants and persons suffering from chronic diseases and impaired immunity, or from severe malnutrition, including vitamin A deficiency.
This contradicts what she says in her second sentence. Vitamin A deficiency has not been identified as “the primary reason” for complications, but just as one of a few that put people in high risk groups. Another reason mentioned here is “impaired immunity”. Does she know for sure that her children don’t have impaired immunity?
The live, attenuated measles vaccines that are now internationally available are safe, effective and relatively inexpensive and may be used interchangeably in immunization programmes.
I will never cease to be amazed how people will quote a part of a sentence from a source that actually maintains the complete oposite position from the one they are trying to support with their cherry picking.
4) “You don’t love your children!” — This is just a rude thing to say! Every parent loves his/her children, and makes what s/he believes to be the best choices. You may disagree and that’s your right, but it is absolutely wrong to say that a parent doesn’t love their child.
She’s absolutely right here. I don’t think many people who are genuinely interested in dialogue will utter those words,but anyone who does has clearly removed himself from the arena of rational, civilized dialogue. When it comes to anti-vaccine proponents my rule of thumb is: doubt their reasoning, not their intentions.
5) “If you don’t vaccinate, your kid can’t go to school!” — False! In 48 states there are medical exemptions, in most religious exemptions, and in about half, philosophical exemptions. Yes, you can use them for college, too. Basically you just have to fill them out and your kids can attend public school, without any vaccines at all. This is a scare tactic that schools and doctors use to get reluctant parents to vaccinate, and it is a lie. (All of you who are afraid of your kids going to school with unvaccinated children…they probably already do!)
Also true. While you are required to provide proof that your child is up to date, all states allow exemptions for medical reasons, and almost all allow for religious reasons. Parents have the choice to seek an exemption if they do not want to vaccinate, however, as I have pointed out before, if their child catches the disease and ends up sickening other kids, those parents have to be held responsible, because they willingly choose to put the community at risk.
Conclusion
The article I reviewed here gives us a glimpse into the anti-vaxxer’s mind. It is my opinion that most anti-vaccine proponents share a few charachteristics which include the following:
- They have convinced themselves that the diseases are harmless, or at the very least that the risk from the disease is much less than the risk from the vaccines.
- They believe their children are no more likely to catch and spread a disease than vaccinated children.
- They believe incidence has decreased independent of vaccines.
- They think that the statistics about the dangers presented by vaccine-preventable diseases are nothing more than fear-mongering.
- They believe vaccines do not work at preventing these diseases.
These beliefs are wrong and not supported by evidence, however it is clear to see that once one accepts these premises as true, the decision not to vaccinate does follow logically. Their conclusion is wrong, as they are starting with the wrong premises, but they are not stupid or idiots, at least the majority aren’t. They are in most cases just as intelligent, if not more intelligent and educated, than the average person. The only difference between anti-vaccine proponents and pro-healthers is the required standard of evidence. If you really look at it, all disagreements boil down to one question: “What is to be considered acceptable evidence?”
This unfortunately means that it is highly unlikely, if not impossible, to change the mind of an anti-vaccine believer, since in order to do that, you’d have to completely change how they assign weight to evidence, akin to trying to convince a religious person to become an atheist on the basis of rational arguments.
And that is something you and I may not be able to do in the vast majority of cases.
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WRT the first point – many conditions, including measles and influenza, are infectious before any symptoms arise, not just from the start of the mild symptoms that precede more serious illness.
Regarding the first point, what appears to be missing is that a vaccinated child is far, far less likely to contract the illness than an unvaccinated one, which means that a child who has been vaccinated has little to fear from a child who hasn’t. A child who can’t be vaccinated (yet) such as an infant too young to get the shots, or a child undergoing cancer treatment, is the one who depends on herd immunity.
Similar issue with point 5. Those children who’ve had all their shots on time don’t need to worry about going to school with unvaccinated kids. The ones with medical contraindications to vaccines are put in danger by increasing numbers of other children not having their shots.
That’s not entirely true. Like the article said, the MMR vaccine is 95% effective against measles, so if an unvaccinated child with measles exposes his class of 20 vaccinated classmates, the odds are that one will catch the disease.
That’s not correct. Whooping cough vaccine for example is estimted to be 80% effective, therefore 1/5 vaccinated children do not benefit from it and are at risk of infection from sick individuals. That is why vaccinating as many people, as well as developping more effective vaccines, is paramount. Of course, the effectiveness of a vaccine has to be balanced against the risks. After all, nothing is more effective in inducing immunity than the disease itself, but it carries too many risks. That is why the vaccine must be attenuated, the virus weakened or completely killed, which in turn reduces the immune response.
Wow! How on earth did we evolve for so long without vaccinations? Thinking about it, how as every species currently on the planet made it?
By having more children. My mother’s grandparents had five children, and three grew to adulthood. Have you ever done any genealogy? Or read any biographies of anyone born before the twentieth century? How many children did the author of Frankenstein have, and how many lived to adulthood?
How willing are you to go back to the days when the loss of children is once again normal?
To make you understand more, watch this fifteen minute video: The Good News of the Decade?. And if you have time, watch this forty minute video: The role of vaccines in global health. Dr. Rosling directly addresses your question.
@Chris: Using my family as an example: No kids in my generation died before adulthood. My parents aren’t that old (early 50s) but both of them have a sibling that didn’t survive to adulthood (one died of whooping cough, the other of complications of a heart defect brought on by influenza). In my grandparents’ generation, each family had at least two kids that didn’t survive to adulthood (and more that were lost in WW2 – my grandmother and great-aunt, for example, are among ten of fourteen kids who survived childhood and the only two who survived the war). The further back I go, the higher the death toll gets in each generation: in by great-great grandmother’s generation, more kids died in childhood than lived.
We made it by having a very high death rate for those many thousands of years.
Yeah sure, our species would survive if we didn’t vaccinate, but that doesn’t mean we should let millions of children die when we have a better way.
Try the Vaccine Song. It starts off with: “Back in the day they didn’t care about the children, they just had more and more. If you lost a few, big whoop — what’s new? It’s what nature had in store.”
Watch the rest of it, and then come back and tell us why we should go back to the “good ol’ days.”
and many women died in childbirth because they had so many ‘trial’ children … yeah let’s go back to then ..
Inferior medical care and the fact that the human head size is so close to the size of the birth canal also played a big role as well.
Modern medicine can make pregnancy much less risky if done in a properly equipped hospital but without such emergency facilities standing by humans do tend to have a relatively high rate of complications compared to other animals (it’s the price we pay for having such big brains).
do some more reading. Modern medicine is not the only reason more women survive child birth.
Provide us with what we should read. Provide the title, journal and date of the PubMed indexed articles that explain all of the things that more women survive childbirth.
Then what are the other reasons childbirth is survived more often these days?
Actually noname, you are right. Public health has a great deal to do with why more survive childbirth. It began with hand washing…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puerperal_fever
“Wow! How on earth did we evolve for so long without vaccinations? Thinking about it, how as every species currently on the planet made it?”
99% of all species that have ever existed on Earth have gone extinct. Heres an article that discusses a study published in Public Library of Science ONE(linked to at the end of the article) on how disease can cause extinction of mammals:
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/11/yes-disease-can/
Science, it works b*ches!
Trying to reason with most of the really fanatical anti-vaccination people is really a waste of time (just like trying to convince Christians they’re wrong is a waste of time), instead the focus should be on convincing the majority of the population that vaccines are necessary and that religious and philosophical exemptions from vaccination shouldn’t exist (only medical exemptions, and only if there actually is a valid medical reason, not because some natropath quack says so).
I personally would prefer dealing with the small minority of people who refuse to vaccinate their children through the criminal justice system, whilst they may believe themselves to be in the right in hurting everyone else including their own children I do not see any reason to consider them any different than drunks who think they can drive safely and also do not see any reason to treat them differently from said drunk drivers.
You are suggesting that parents who refuse to vaccinate their children should be dealt with by the criminal justice system? Are you implying there should be a pre-emptive persecution of those parents, just in case their children infect someone in the future?
There is a risk that when you get in your car, you will injure someone. Should you also be pre-emptively persecuted for driving?
Idiotic.
It’s nothing we don’t already do to drunk drivers (or do you think it is perfectly OK for someone who can barely stand to be driving a car?).
If wait until people die or are seriously injured before punishing those who put the rest of society in grave danger (either by driving when drunk or not vaccinating their kids) then we’re going to have a lot more dead and seriously injured people than if we prevent from doing harm before they manage to cause it.
I agree that it is a bit extreme. I am okay with those who ignore public health measures should just stay away from publicly paid for venues like tax funded schools, clinics, community centers, etc.
Keeping children away from even just the publicly paid for places would probably constitute cruelty (and it isn’t a child’s fault that the parent believes quacks) and still wouldn’t protect people they come in contact with since there are plenty of places not publicly paid for where people congregate.
Of course we should try things less drastic than making not vaccinating a crime (e.g. education campaigns, making it harder to get exemptions, etc) but there will always be a small core which needs to be told in no uncertain terms that their actions are unacceptable and will not be tolerated by the rest of us.
There is no real requirement that a child be educated in a public school. If a parent is going to ignore basic public health measures, then they can either pay for private school or homeschool.
I am not sympathetic to those who whine that homeschool means a parent needs to stay home, since I had to stay home to deal with my disabled kid.
I am also in favor of the health insurance companies requiring higher co-pays for parents who skip vaccines. Make sure they know that since they are not preventing health concerns, they should pay more when their child does get sick.
Making them pay extra probably would prevent a substantial proportion of them from not vaccinating but the scope of keeping them away from public places is much wider than just public schools.
The parents are the ones who are the problem, not the kids so it is wrong to punish the kids for the mistakes of their parents.
Very true. Which is probably why having the insurance company insist they practice preventative medicine might be more effective.
And on the punishing of the kids for the mistakes of their parents: this evening I listened to the Skeptics Zone podcast from Australia (http://skepticzone.tv/). In the Dr. Rachie interview, she mentioned that a twenty-two year old woman died from diphtheria. She had traveled overseas and picked up the disease, apparently she had never been vaccinated. The young woman paid the ultimate price for her parents’ actions. Now her parents are now being punished for their mistake in one of the most horrible ways.
I actually agree with you on this one. This was a friend of mine’s story: “and just so you know, this is one physician whose son is vaccinated on schedule.
The worst conversation of my professional life? The one I had with some parents last summer, informing them of the death of their 2 children…..from a disease for which they had repeatedly declined inoculation.”
This is worthy of criminal charges. They refused inoculating their children, and without the now deceased members consent. The parents literally wrote their child’s death. It’s absolutely sick.
There are parallels with people not taking their very sick children to a doctor because they rely on faith healing (a lot of those people don’t believe in vaccines).
I’ll just put a link to CHILD who are arguing (correctly I might add) that religious exemptions from child neglect and homicide laws should be abolished.
Personally I suspect that criminalising not getting vaccinations would cause most of those even in the anti-vaccination movement to give their children the vaccines (they’ll hate doing it, but they aren’t going to want to go to jail). Of course to actually do that we’d need the majority of society on our side.
And what do you say to the parents whose children have died as a direct result of the vaccinations they gave their children without their children’s consent? They acted in what they believed to be the best interests of their child and now their child is dead. Would you seriously want them prosecuted too? After all, their ACTIONS caused the death as opposed to your belief that LACK OF ACTION caused the deaths of the unvaccinated children.
I would ask for the citations of those incidents. Perhaps the PubMed indexed case reports, and definitely not VAERS. Plus give us the statistics of that particular vaccine versus the disease or diseases it is meant to prevent.
You are making a claim, you need to provide verifiable documentation of those claims.
I would ask that they stop lying.
It is very sad that all these people will disregard the fact that infants die from vaccines. There are definitely risks associated with vaccines and to say don’t reference “VAERS” is INSANE. You do realize that the CDC is an advocate of vaccines and handles VAERS correct? You do also realize that VAERS data is separated into two parts…claims made and those claims paid because enough EVIDENCE FROM MEDICAL PROVIDERS was offered to support the outcome was indeed vaccine related. The truth is the way people portray anti-vax advocates as stubborn and unwilling to look at hard evidence is the same for pro-vax individuals. You can give them all the studies/citations/cases in the world and they want to believe so badly that what they are doing is right that they just ignore it. It does no good to argue with these people. Research for yourself and make the best decision for your family.
Tara, at the official entry to the VAERS database, http://vaers.hhs.gov/data/index , it says:
Can you please tell us in your own words what you must read and understand before using the VAERS database?
So the government should be able to tell us what to eat think and drink?
Why are you worried if your children are vaccinated? if you believe in their ability so much then why worry? Lets make more laws preventing free speech and personal opinions, you are a SHEEP… BAHHHHHHH your backassward thinking is what is wrong with this country, bet you think marijuana is more harmful then achohol and cigarettes too, because Uncle Sam told you so…go out eat your yellow # 5 suck down your diet cola and keep your opinions to yourself
So what do think about a pair of teenagers with measles wandering around the Super Bowl Village,possibly infecting vulnerable people, including babies too young for the MMR? Do you think they should be held accountable for any injury to others?
Are you in favor of letting them cause harm just for their own “freedom”?
“Why are you worried if your children are vaccinated? if you believe in their ability so much then why worry? ”
Damn right – your logic is unassailable. it’s like when people try to force us to drive sober – if they’re so sure that driving sober is safe, why does it matter if other people drive drunk. More power to the unvaccinated, drunken freedom-lovers!!!!!
I know many parents who have chosen not to vaccinate and we all are unhappy about it. We all want to protect our kids but our kids have health issues that makes us worry if the vaccine will injure them. We are not trusting the pharmaceutical industry and the studies they have published. Just as I don’t trust the tabbaco industry, or any industry with billions of dollars in profits. My son had a reaction to his 2 month vaccines and yet I was so determined it was important I immunized him again at six months. He got a reaction again and began to have medical problems and developmental delays. My pediatrician said I should consider holding off on vaccinating for a while. My son was diagnosed with autism and I was thrown into a community with parents whose children had other medical issues besides autism and worried if they were healthy enough to vaccinate and other families that blamed the vaccines for their child’s health problems in the first place. There are children with mitochondrial dysfunction who shouldn’t vaccinate, perhaps there are some children who have genetic weaknesses that shouldn’t be vaccinated and we need to test if there is a subset of autistic children who shouldn’t as well. Most parents I meet want to vaccinate but their child has developmental delays and comorbities of many different health problems that make them scared to. When you have a child with both medical and neurological problems you do become hyper nervous of doing any more harm to them. I know the risks of not vaccinating they haunt me everyday. All I desperately want is a healthy child.
That would count, I suspect, as a valid medical reason not to vaccinate, in which case your (and the others’) children would be dependent on herd immunity preventing the spread of the various diseases, and hence on those with healthy children who may be thinking of not vaccinating for religious or health-scare objections.
“We are not trusting the pharmaceutical industry and the studies they have published.” What about the overwhelming evidence from the entire medical establishment? Not anecdote, evidence.
“My son had a reaction…and began to have medical problems and developmental delays.”
What evidence do you have that these “reactions” were caused by the vaccines? There is currently NO evidence of any link between autism and vaccination. NONE. There have been many studies that show NO evidence of a link. NONE!
“There are children with mitochondrial dysfunction who shouldn’t vaccinate…”
What evidence do you have of ANY of this?
“All I desperately want is a healthy child.”
I’m sure every parent wants this. You can help by informing yourself and consulting medical professionals who can help (e.g. by evaluating if your child can be vaccinated.)
There actually was a famous case where the courts decided that mitochondrial deficiencies were responsible for the vaccination causing autism. However, it was a bad decision. Most medical professionals think that they are unlinked: <a href="http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp0802904" title="Vaccines and Autism Revisited — The Hannah Poling Case — New England Journal of Medicine".
There are times when I wish vaccines did cause autism, although I’m regularly disgusted by the level of anti-autistic bigotry in the anti-vaccination movement (even if vaccines caused as much autism as they claim you’d pretty much have to consider autism as worse than death to justify not vaccinating).
Vaccine reactions usually aren’t too bad (the odd rash mostly) though people who get the relatively severe ones would have a medical reason not to vaccinate, just so long as there are still enough people vaccinated for herd immunity to work. It’s very unlikely that there is any correlation between autism and serious vaccine reactions (autism is something a person is born with anyway).
Of course a person who gets severe vaccine reactions may also be a person who is likely to get a much more severe form of the disease should they ever catch it.
BTW: The anti-vaccination industry is also quite profitable, after all, didn’t Andrew Wakefield get £400,000 from a lawyer (who was suing vaccine manufacturers) to produce the infamous study which started the whole MMR mass-hysteria. Vaccines are also so cheap that there isn’t really much profit in making them (the really profitable drugs are things like Statins).
You do realize 400,000 pounds is chump change compared to what pharmaceutical companies make off of the public following their “recommended” schedules right?
Do tell us. Explain exactly how it is more cost effective to let every kid get measles, mumps and rubella instead of giving them two doses of the MMR vaccine.
Before the first measles vaccine in 1963 almost every child had measles before they turned fifteen. One out of about a thousand cases of measles requires hospital treatment (and one in three thousand ended up in a cemetery). Though the present measles epidemic in Europe is putting about one out of every four cases of measles into hospital.
Now do tell us with real numbers and citations how much less money is spent taking care of children with pneumonia, encephalitis, etc when they have measles than preventing measles with two doses of a vaccine.
“You do realize 400,000 pounds is chump change compared to what pharmaceutical companies make off of the public following their “recommended” schedules right?”
Yep. Chump change is exactly the right term for the amount of money it took to convince former Dr. Wakefield to fake up some results for his bosses.
I am sorry to hear about your son. From what you say, you sound like you understand how important vaccinations are, and I am saddened to hear about your son’s reactions, which I assume were severe enough to make your doctor advise on holding off on vaccines. In that case, I think listening to your child’s doctor was the wise thing to do.
I also understand your point about not trusting the industry which has a direct stake in the fight. It is a fact that studies that are funded by industry, no matter which industry, tend to have more positive outcomes than studies funded by public money or other sources, which doesn’t mean they’re fraudulent, it just means we have to take them with a greater grain of salt, especially if they seem to contradict the evidence up to that point.
Luckily for us, we do not have to rely on Pharma studies; a lot of the existing scientific evidence on vaccines, (I would like to say the majority, but I don’t have a statistic available) is funded not by Pharma, but by public/private money. All conflicts of interest are supposed to be disclosed so that they can be evaluated.
The mistake that most people in the anti-vaccine camp do is that they dismiss, out of hand, not only industry-funded studies, but also government funded studies (via the government-is-in-the-Big-Pharma-pocket line of “reasoning”), and any study by anyone who was ever involved in any vaccine decision capacity, received any speaking fees ever etc. When you do that, you’re not left with many experts, or funders, to pay for running the studies.
Vaccines are not a completely risk-free proposition and there certainly are some individuals for whom it makes sense, from a medical point, to skip vaccinations. I just hope that with time and study we can get better at identifying those individuals so that the best choice is made for each individual person.
Fabulously written! and much appreciated!
“parents” is misspelled in the title. It’s not fabulously written if the author cannot be bothered to run a spell checker.
‘Parents’ is spelled correctly – it is not a possessive use and no apostrophe is required. ‘Parents of some children’ is perfectly correct. It is a simple plural. Even if the sentence were constructed differently, it would still be the correct spelling – ‘some children’s parents’.
However, he did use ‘off’ when he should have used ‘of’.
Perhaps you should think more before be so pedantic – or attempting to be.
I have made the adjustments, thank you for pointing them out. I did run a spell checker, unfortunately it does not check the title. Furthermore, even if it did, it wouldn’t be able to distinguish between “parents” and “parent’s”. That requires a human eye and I am glad you’ve lend me yours. I hope you were able to get past that, and read the article for the message I’m trying to get across.
LOL the author seems just as deluded as the person being critiqued. I came here hoping for some good information and rational arguments, however, it seems both sides can’t quite see the whole picture.
And LOL @ comparing not being vaccinated to having unprotected sex and sharing needles.
Where can I find some unbiased information on this topic? I guess I need to stick to the case studies and come to a conclusion on my own.
Could you elaborate on the specific points of the article that indicate delusion?
You won’t unbiased information anywhere about anything.
Though it just so happens that reality sometimes has a bias.
Try reading the Vaccine Book by Dr. Sears. It’s lays out the information vaccine by vaccine and lets the reader decide. I found it very helpful!
Why waste money on a book when you can just get every recommended vaccine (none of which currently have safety problems worse than not taking them, you don’t need to buy a book to learn that).
What are Dr. Sears qualifications in immunization, vaccines and epidemiology? Perhaps you should read a review of the book by pediatrician Dr. John Snyder: Cashing In On Fear: The Danger of Dr. Sears, where he says:
Dr. Snyder outlines many errors made by Dr. Sears in his book. Errors that can have some very dire consequences if enough parents followed Dr. Sears’ recommendations.
“Secondly, she demands that she’ll only consider doing something for the greater good if it is absolutely, 100% harmless to her child, which is not unreasonable either. ”
I disagree, that is *entirely* unreasonable: there is nothing known to humanity that is “100% harmless”. Pretty much everything that there is is relatively harmless, *contingent* on other factors.
Otherwise, excellent article.
My point was that, if the only reason we were asking someone to vaccinate their children was to protect others, it would not be unreasonable for them to demand 100% safety, although to be sure that’s just as good as declining to do it, since nothing is 100% safe.
I do understand though, as a parent, that even the slightest risk to my child, for no benefit to her, but solely for the benefit of others, would not be a proposition I’d be too comfortable with, and that is how many anti-vaccine parents will react to the “greater good” argument.
“they will stay at home if sick, thus infecting nobody” is easily defeated thusly:
If that was true, nobody would ever -get- infected by anyone, thus infectious disease would not exist. But it does, thus the argument can’t hold.
So, when science was telling us to ‘bleed our illnesses away’ would you have punished those who refused? Medical science has so often been proved wrong yet still people blindly believe their Doctor. In my lifetime I have been prescribed medication more than once which has later been withdrawn because of ‘side effects’.
All illnesses have their peaks and troughs regardless of medication and we really need to look at health improvements made in nutrition, lifestyle, clean water and sanitation.
We have vaccinations for those at risk of Typhoid but still people die from it in poor sanitation areas.
I believe that most if not all vaccinations are irrelevant and much more to do with profit than health care.
Actually it wasn’t science which told people to “bleed our illnesses away” but science which showed that to be a stupid thing to do.
Bloodletting was a practice based on the ancient doctrine of the four humours which science refuted (and had already been shown to be nonsense in the 19th century).
As for your nonsense about it not being vaccines but other things which caused the drop in diseases, why didn’t better sanitation, nutrition, etc deal with all the other diseases at the same time instead of only after a vaccine was developed against that disease.
See http://www.quackwatch.org/03HealthPromotion/immu/immu01.html for why you are wrong.
It’s almost as if what determines when a disease drops in incidence permanently is when the vaccine becomes available.
Vaccines also aren’t all that profitable especially when you compare them to the other medicines the pharmaceutical companies make (e.g. Statins).
Good point! I agree, many of these illness where on the decline before the rise in popularity of vaccines
Except that they weren’t on the decline before the vaccine became popular.
That is just not true. Many illness where most certianly on the decline due to things like sanitation, before vaccines where administured to everyone.
Then prove it. Just make sure that you do not confuse morbidity with mortality, just show the morbidity data. Please do not include scarlet fever, which is an untreated strep infection (and still very prevalent). Stick to diseases that are covered in the present pediatric schedule in the USA (so no typhoid, typhus or cholera data). Link to the original data, and not to a website like childhealthsafety.
The following is the type of data I am asking for, and while I am at it you can explain what great improvements in sanitation reduced measles incidence in the USA by 90% between 1960 and 1970. Be sure to provide the scientific documentation to support your answer:
From http://www.census.gov/prod/99pubs/99statab/sec31.pdf
Year…. Rate per 100000 of measles
1912 . . . 310.0
1920 . . . 480.5
1925 . . . 194.3
1930 . . . 340.8
1935 . . . 584.6
1940 . . . 220.7
1945 . . . 110.2
1950 . . . 210.1
1955 . . . 337.9
1960 . . . 245.4
1965 . . . 135.1
1970 . . . . 23.2
1975 . . . . 11.3
1980 . . . . . 5.9
1985 . . . . . 1.2
1990 . . . . .11.2
1991 . . . . . .3.8
1992 . . . . . .0.9
1993 . . . . . .0.1
1994 . . . . . .0.4
1995 . . . . . .0.1
1996 . . . . . .0.2
1997 . . . . . . 0.1
Disease rates tended to fluctuate around a bit but before vaccines were licensed they weren’t on an overall downward trend.
Then when the vaccines came out they started going down (with some lag as people were usually vaccinated some years before they would usually get the disease).
If it were sanitation which was responsible you’d expect all diseases to have shown the same downward trend at the same time, but instead what we see is that diseases stay roughly steady until a vaccine becomes available, then soon after the incidence rate drops.
See http://www.quackwatch.org/03HealthPromotion/immu/immu01.html
That is because it advances and changes. People learn new things, and then change what they are doing to a better way. Like removing lead from paint and gasoline. Or preventing children from dying with vaccines, so that a family can have two children and be reasonably sure they will both grow up to become adults.
Unfortunately there are those who are stuck in the past. That would include those who rely on homeopathy (which has not changed in two hundred years), or keep going on about thimerosal in vaccines (all pediatric vaccines have had thimerosal free versions for a decade).
Sanitation does nothing for respiratory diseases like pertussis and measles. Also it caused an increase in polio in the early part of the twentieth century due to babies not getting it early. But sanitation is why we do not vaccinate for cholera, typhoid and typhus.
Please look at page 30 of this report and tell me where vaccines fall on that chart. Then tell us exactly how treating measles, mumps, pertussis, diphtheria, polio and other vaccine preventable diseases are so much cheaper than preventing them with vaccines. Provide us a real report on how expensive vaccines are compared to putting a child on a respirator. Something on the order of this kind of evidence:
Economic Evaluation of the 7-Vaccine Routine Childhood Immunization Schedule in the United States, 2001
Zhou F, Santoli J, Messonnier ML, Yusuf HR, Shefer A, Chu SY, Rodewald L, Harpaz R.
Arch Pediatr Adolesc Med. 2005;159:1136-1144.
An economic analysis of the current universal 2-dose measles-mumps-rubella vaccination program in the United States.
Zhou F, Reef S, Massoudi M, Papania MJ, Yusuf HR, Bardenheier B, Zimmerman L, McCauley MM.
J Infect Dis. 2004 May 1;189 Suppl 1:S131-45.
Pediatric hospital admissions for measles. Lessons from the 1990 epidemic.
Chavez GF, Ellis AA.
West J Med. 1996 Jul-Aug;165(1-2):20-5.
You also seem to have a shaky grasp on history. I am shocked that you did not know that family size has changed over the past century, and that child mortality rates have declined. Remember those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it. Here is some reading to remedy your knowledge deficits:
Polio: An American Story by David M. Oshinsky
Flu: The Story Of The Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus that Caused It by Gina Kolata
The Great Influenza by John Barry (this book also goes through a history of how medicine changed early in the 20th century)
Vaccine by Arthur Allen
Actually, the average family size has decressed. This of course is now by choice. Just look at how many children out great grand parents and grand parents had. In most familys it was not uncommon to have 5 or more. When now most people have only 2 or 3.
And your point? I said “Or preventing children from dying with vaccines, so that a family can have two children and be reasonably sure they will both grow up to become adults.”
There is a correlation between child mortality and number of children.
“Medical science has so often been proved wrong yet still people blindly believe their Doctor.”
Blind belief (or disbelief) is what anti-vaxers advocate. Scientific fact is what there is sufficient evidence to support, with little or no contradictory evidence. In the case of infectious disease, fact is that vaccines usually offer the best opportunity of protecting the population and even of eradicating these diseases completely.
“In my lifetime I have been prescribed medication more than once which has later been withdrawn because of ‘side effects’.”
No need for the scare quotes – occasionally, new medications are found to produce side effects that carry a risk that is not acceptable, compared to the condition it is prescribed for. All medications may cause side effects; because they’re indicated for people who are NOT ill, the acceptable level of side effects of vaccines is extremely low, so vaccines are among the safest medical interventions in the pharmaceutical arsenal. Vaccines are actually safer than most over-the counter meds and most assuredly DO prevent diseases, the effects of which can be debilitating or deadly. ALL the currectly available evidence point to these facts and there is currently NO reliable evidence that contradict them.
http://www.who.int/immunization_safety/safety_quality/vaccine_safety_websites/en/index.html
http://www.phac-aspc.gc.ca/publicat/cig-gci/cedv-cemv-tab-eng.php
Would you be so kind as to provide links to studies comparing vaccines to placebos? And by placebo, I don’t mean other vaccines or experimental vaccines, I mean things like sugar pills.
I’ve done some research on my own, currently on Daptacel, but I can’t find anything that compares Daptacel to a placebo.
Josh,
Stay tuned for the next issue where we explore the ethics and legalities of a prospective vaccinated vs. completely unvaccinated study that you demand. In the mean time, can you find any anti-vaccine parents willing to enroll their children in such a study, where randomization and blinding would require they *risk* their children be vaccinated following the full recommended schedule? Or alternatively, can you find parents who want to protect their children who are willing to risk leaving their children unprotected for the duratino of the study, which must be 3-5 years if we want to properly check for things like autism?
Check this for Daptacel, see if you find your answer there. http://www.fda.gov/downloads/BiologicsBloodVaccines/Vaccines/ApprovedProducts/UCM103057.pdf
Here is one study. Look at the first table, and tell us what the third and fourth column are showing.
Also look up the what happened in Willowbrook School, where disabled children were used for vaccine testing. It is a major reason for several regulations on ethics in medical testing on children.
Next time you bring up vax/unvax testing with placebos, explain very carefully how you would protect the children who only get placebos. Tell us exactly how to avoid the third and fourth column of the linked study.
So how exactly do you prove safety if you don’t test it against an inert placebo? At some point the safety has to be tested against something doesn’t it other than another vaccine doesn’t it?
What do we tell heart patients who might die from the placebo when testing heart medications?
What do we tell cancer patients when we test cancer medications against placebos?
Admittedly, I’m no research scientist, but how can prove something is safe if you don’t test it against something that is inert? You’re not proving safety, only that it might be less dangerous than what you’re comparing it to.
And like you’ve accused me of in the past, please post something current, this study is really old.
And Daptacel is the next vaccine my daughter will be getting, but that doesn’t mean I’m done doing research.
And as far as L. Shaka’s post, I’ve read that study, and it doesn’t fit what I was looking for, it compares pertussis vaccines to other vaccines.
And yes, I would be happy to let my daughter participate in said study, except for a HIB study, as she’s already had that shot.
Josh, if you read the first few pages of the document you’ll see, that Daptacel is the fifth DTaP vaccine to be licensed for use in the US. This is not a new kind of vaccine, it is the same acellular vaccine as the others, just a different brand. The question being answered is : Is this vaccine better or worse than the existing ones? That is why it is being compared to the existing vaccines. If it does the job just as well, and if it is just as safe, there would be no reason to deny its use. And that is what they showed by comparing the new brand with the existing ones. So long as the risk and efficacy profiles are the same, it would be approved and it did.
http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5126a5.htm
Now if you are looking for overall DTaP vaccine safety that’s a separate thing, which we can look into.
Again, before you bring this subject up again educate yourself on the history of vaccine testing, and how they are presently tested. Read up on what happened at Willowbrook and elsewhere, this would be a good start. Then tell us exactly how you would perform the study so that the placebo arm suffers no adverse harm, and would be approved by an institutional review board.
You may wish to read this study which compared children who had had no vaccines to the health of those children who had been vaccinated. The only difference was that those who had not been vaccinated suffered more vaccine preventable diseases.
You are not really fostering much confidence in your grasp of how science and medical research works with your comments. You may need to catch up by taking some basic science, statistic and perhaps some history courses at your local community college.
Thanks for the sarcasm.
I shouldn’t have to have a particularly strong grasp of science and medical research to understand the health risks associated with something I’m injecting in my child.
All I want are straight answers from both sides of the argument (which led me to this site). Instead all I find in your “journey” is that vaccines rule and anybody who questions them is an idiot and doesn’t understand medical and research science and is killing their own children as well as other people’s children.
I apologize for being concerned with the health of my children.
When I go to the doctor and ask them what sort of screening they do for potential allergic reactions, and they say none, I get concerned.
When I ask how they can tell which ingredient my child might have a reaction to, if they have one, and they say they can’t tell, I get concerned.
So then I start to research vaccines, and you either get “why would you dare ask about them, they’ve fixed everything” or “vaccines will kill you”.
Again, sorry I’m not a research scientist, I wasn’t aware I needed to be to try and do what’s best for MY child.
If you don’t have a decent grasp of basic science then you pretty have no hope of understanding anything (and not just on vaccines).
Now if you don’t want to have the understanding of science and medicine needed to be able to understand exactly why not vaccinating is more dangerous than vaccinating you can rely on those who do have that understanding, but there is no way that you’d be able to independently come to any conclusion without developing that basic grasp.
It wasn’t sarcasm. You have some real gaps in your grasp of science and basic statistics.
I know you are trying to be sincere, but you are being hampered by not understanding the concepts. Take allergies as an example: a person can only have an allergy reaction only after their immune system has been primed to the allergen. It is not the first bee sting that causes a reaction, but the second one after your immune system has over reacted.
Therefore there really cannot be an allergy test for something a child has not been exposed to.
Josh, here’s the nutshell as far as I understand it. There are definitely double blind placebo controlled studies for new vaccines. I can easily show you ones for chicken pox, rotavirus, Hib, etc. But Daptacel is a combination vaccine. When it was licensed, it would have been unethical to test it against placebo because the components of Daptacel (diptheria, tetanus, and pertussis vaccines) were already licensed and part of the standard of care. It would be unethical to withhold the standard of care from the control group, rather, you have to test it against the components to make sure that it is as safe and effective (or moreso) than the components that are already licensed.
Similarly, when we test medicines for heart patients or cancer patients, we *don’t* test them against placebos, in general. The control arm gets the existing standard of care. The trial has to show that the new medicine is at least as good as the existing standard of care.
Now, sometimes it is difficult to go back and find the original trials for some vaccines (or chemo drugs, or heart therapies) that have been around since the early part of the 20th century, like diphtheria, etc, and more difficult still to get full texts of those. And to be honest, vaccine testing may not have been done as stringently 50-100 years ago as it is now. So, we augment our knowledge by using other means to monitor and test the safety of these vaccines, looking retrosepectively at the vaccines, and using ongoing monitoring systems, etc. When we do this, we find that they are extraordinarily safe.
One caveat that I would caution you against is assuming that because a DBPC study is considered the gold standard, it is the only valid way to study something. When you have a lot of data, looking at a problem from different angles, the combined data may be as or more reliable than a DBPC study.
Nathan, thanks for making this point; it is very important, you coould not test a vaccine which is known to work vs. no vaccine, it would not pass ethical review. Furthermore, the history of the pertussis vaccine goes through the whole cell pertussis vaccine, or DTP which was in use until the acellular one DTaP was first licensed for use in the US in 1991.
Even more, before pertussis was a disease we vaccinated against, DT (diphteria tetanus) vaccine was in use, if I am not wrong. We’d have to first establish the correct timeline, and then look through the scientific evidence going back 50-100 years as you said. At every new juncture the new formulations would have been tested against the then existing vaccine to see if they were more or less safe.
It is quite likely that a study of DTaP vs. a completely inert placebo cannot be found.
Here’s a quick history of the vaccine.
http://www.immunizationinfo.org/vaccines/pertussis-whooping-cough#history-of-the-vaccine
Exactly. Applies to MMR too. if I understand the thread here, Chris posted a link to a placebo controlled study above for measles, and Josh complained that it was to old. Of course it is old, because the measles vaccine is old. Once that vaccine was shown to be safe and effective, it became the standard of care. You’re not going to find much in the way of DBPC studies for a vaccine, or a combination vaccine that contains that component, after the vaccine is licensed for general use, because of these ethical issues. But, there are many ways of ensuring safety in already established vaccines.
Josh also failed to answer the question of what was tabulated in the third and fourth columns of the first table. He seemed adverse to writing a certain word, which is a real outcome with a real measles infection.
Plus the reason it is “old” is because laws on ethical testing of medical interventions have changed.
Thanks Nathan and L. Shaka, at least you attempt to answer my questions.
Chris, sorry forgot to use the “word”, PEOPLE DIED FROM A DISEASE. Yep, some kids died from measles, in 1962. Happy?
You use the same fear-mongering that the anti-vaccine community uses.
I’ve never said vaccines don’t work in any of posts, not once. I’ve never said not to get a vaccine, again, not once.
I’m concerned over the safety of vaccines for MY child, that’s all, which is why I attempt to research and then do what I think is appropriate, not blindly follow recommendations.
Fear-mongering is only wrong when the fear is baseless or exaggerated.
I was not fear mongering. The question was how do you prevent the same thing happening to children assigned to a placebo group. That was a study that actually did what you wanted, though you may disagree on the “placebo.” It shows what happened to those children who were denied protection from measles.
Okay, I don’t answer your questions. But I am trying to get you actually think about your questions, and to adequately educate yourself to the history of testing on children. Really, please, read up on the history and legalities behind using human subject:
Complete Vaccinated vs. Unvaccinated Series.
Think about how one can test vaccines to your satisfaction without causing harm to children.
Here is some reading that might help you:
Polio: An American Story by David M. Oshinsky
Flu: The Story Of The Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus that Caused It by Gina Kolata
The Great Influenza by John Barry (this book also goes through a history of how medicine changed early in the 20th century)
Vaccine by Arthur Allen
You probably will refuse to read anything by an actual vaccine researcher and pediatrician because he is hated by several who have issues with vaccines. But the biography he wrote on Maurice Hilleman is an outstanding review of vaccine development history, and goes into the ethics of testing vaccines on disabled children living in institutions.
Josh,
I understand your desire for answers; as a parent of a 4-year-old, and soon to be a father again I understand your need to minimize risk for your children as much as possible. Nevertheless, please understand that the science of vaccines is very complex and vast, and a lay person, such as you and I cannot realistically pretend to be able to review it all, and come to our own independent conclusions. At best we can look at a tiny slice, which coupled with lack of knowledge of relevant areas in medicine and imunology, will lead us to very unreliable conclusions. Anyone who is telling you otherwise is just stroking you ego to get you on their side. I don’t do that here.
That is why we must rely on expert advice in order to be confident that the decisions we make for our children are the best, statistically speaking. Now, you may find their answer unsatisfactory, but there are limitations to what can, and cannot be done, at the moment. There is no test that can tell us if a child will have an allergic reaction to vaccines. There just isn’t. You might like for it to be, but there isn’t. In that case you have to go with the odds.
It is true that you do not need a grasp of science to understand the odds, but you do need it if you want to review the scientific literature on your own. If you want to know what the best science to date says about the risk profile of the DTaP vaccine, regardless of which of the 5 brands currently in use your doctor uses, all you have to do is read the Vaccine Information Statement on the CDC website. You can find a copy of it here: http://www.immunize.org/vis/dtap01.pdf The odds for the expected side effects are spelled out in there.
If you doubt the accuracy of that, you’ll have to delve into the scientific literature going back decades, but even then you might start doubting the statistics run, the people doing the studies, the older studies etc. Doubting is easy, figuring out when to rely on expert advice is harder.
Now, do not make light of the severity of diseases such as measles. The reason peole don’t die as much today as they used to is a combination of better medical care *and* vaccines. Measles didn’t magically dissapear on its own, it was driven out by vaccines. It is not a harmless disease. 6 people died in France this year alone from it. 1-2 deaths per 1,000 infections might sound little, but if you didn’t have vaccines to keep the infection numbers low, an outbreak of the proportions of the 1989-1990 US Measles Outbreak could result in lots of children deaths. That is not fear mongering, that is fact.
Research will always be incomplete..always! Anyone who tells you that research on vaccines is “incomplete” or “not definitive” is pulling wool over your eyes, because scientific research is always incomplete and not definitive, especially in medicine. There’s always new things to learn, given how complex the human body is. There may always be extremely rare side effects that no clinical trial can unearth. But those are all hypotheticals, maybes. What is sure, is that if you let whooping cough, measles, rotavirus, HepB etc run wild, you find yourself dealing with thousands of pediatric deaths, and suffering. That’s a fact, proven by history, not a hypothetical.
You can choose to take the odds and not vaccinate your child; and you might even get away with it. But then you might not. No choice is absolutely safe. You have to weigh the pros and the cons, and take the less risky choice. Even that one though is not risk-free. That’s another thing that we as parents abhor, but reality is that everything carries risk, and try as we might we cannot eliminate risk for our children completely.
I wish you the best of luck and hope that you will make the best decision for your child and family, whatever that decision happens to be.
Leart,
Sorry about that – I just realized that much of my post below addressed what you wrote, and you addressed it much more eloquently. Very nicely put.
Josh, you said above,
“I shouldn’t have to have a particularly strong grasp of science and medical research to understand the health risks associated with something I’m injecting in my child.”
I disagree. If you are skeptical about following the advice of experts in the field on this topic, or the layman’s summaries produced by the CDC, etc., then you definitely need to have a strong grasp of the science and medical research to understand these health risks for yourself. Vaccination, and vaccine risk, are complicated medical topics requiring a lot of background knowledge. If you are looking at the studies, you need a level of scientific literacy, lest you conflate a poor study with a strong one, etc.
For an example, if my mechanic says something is wrong with my car, I’m darn well going to need to know how a car works to demonstrate to my mechanic that something else is wrong with my car instead.
Regarding “When I go to the doctor and ask them what sort of screening they do for potential allergic reactions, and they say none, I get concerned.”
and,
“When I ask how they can tell which ingredient my child might have a reaction to, if they have one, and they say they can’t tell, I get concerned.”
First, there should at least be the screening via history of whether the child has a known allergy to eggs or another ingredient, or another vaccine. In cases where there is high risk, children can be allergy tested, though recent research indicates in the case of eggs this is only necessary in the case of a history of actual anaphylactic reaction.
But as far as diagnostic testing, why does that get you concerned? Food allergy is far more common than vaccine allergy. Yet we do not test every single child for every single child for every single possibe food allergy before they are exposed to the foods. Does that concern you as well?
The reason we don’t, of course, is that it is infeasible or impossible to do so. And in the case of vaccines, (unlike, say, peanuts) there is great benefit to giving the vaccine that far outweighs the very small risk of allergy or reaction.
Perhaps someday in the future we will be able to screen all children for all kinds of allergy. But that is impossible now. However, in the absence of that knowledge, we still feed them a variety of foods, as well as vaccinate, because the tiny risk of vaccination is overshadowed manyfold by the benefits.
Thanks L. Shaka and Nathan for your responses, they were very helpful.
Just out of curiosity, could you point me in the direction of some resources regarding how they determined that 2,4,6 or some other combination of months was the most appropriate to start vaccines?
Why isn’t 1 year, 2 year, 3 year, or some other schedule? Were there trials to narrow it down to the most effective and/or safest range? Are their studies showing the difference between getting any given vaccine at 2,4,6 vs getting the same vaccine at 3,5,7 or some other time frame?
I haven’t had much luck with searching for the above.
It’s pretty much a case of the earlier the better because you just don’t know when they’ll first come in contact with whatever it is the vaccine is meant to protect them from (kids have died because they got a disease before they were old enough for the vaccine).
You might try reading through the minutes of ACIP to see what kind of discussion is done:
http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/recs/acip/meetings.htm
I have found earlier ones by using the search function at the CDC and through Google. There are also similar sites on the NHS, Australia and I have even found some from Japan (with limited English papers).
You can also find several papers on timing of vaccines on PubMed, but you need to search for the specific vaccine (there are actually many from Japan questioning their government’s policies on diseases like mumps!). Mostly what I have found were studies trying to get measles vaccination done in earlier ages in places like India where it is more endemic. I have also seen papers trying to get infants immunized earlier for pertussis (though I believe the consensus is that it is easier to increase herd immunity with the Tdap).
Plus to continue what Anon said: some vaccines like Hib and rotavirus are given when children are more vulnerable to the illness, so it would not do any good at a later date.
Good question, very hard to answer though. I freely admit this one doesn’t look like a question I can possibly answer satisfactorily. Here’s what a CDC document says about it:
You can read the full thing here: http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/rr5102a1.htm
This is a little too complicated of a question to answer completely, or to give a single link (or set of links) that answers them, because there are different reasons for each vaccine. For example, pertussis (and many other VPDs) are most lethal to younger infants, so it is important to get the vaccine series started as soon as possible. The only thing then to determine is if the vaccine is safe and effective at that age, and clinical trials are done to determine this. On the other hand, a vaccine for measles is less effective at ages less than 12 months, because antibodies from the mother (which do help prevent measles) interfere with the ability of the shot to work. So you have to wait for that maternally-derived immunity to wear off first. There is certainly the question of compliance – they want the vaccines to be given together at the times when babies go in for well child checks as well.
Here is a link that answers some of the questions you have, but may not be in as much detail as you like.
http://www.vaccinateyourbaby.org/pdfs/Vaccine_schedule.pdf
Thanks.
This was a friend of mine’s story: “and just so you know, this is one physician whose son is vaccinated on schedule.
The worst conversation of my professional life? The one I had with some parents last summer, informing them of the death of their 2 children…..from a disease for which they had repeatedly declined inoculation.”
This is worthy of criminal charges. How can these dumba** parents protect their own children so horribly, under the guise of care and concern? I can’t even get smug about this story because the children were the victims. I don’t believe they were able to give their consent on whether or not ///they/// wanted to be vaccinated or not. And now they’re dead. That is absolutely disgusting. I hope the parents learned their lesson, alas it was the hard way. I’ve only been to two forums and it already appears that anti-vaxxers are the religious zealots of the medical world.
It’s not just the anti-vaxers though (and most of the various forms of quackery tend to support each other to some degree).
Ive heard countless stories of children dead from a vaccine .. So who is the dumb**s in that situation? If parent wanna vaccinate go for it but Please don’t sit on your high horse that others are wrong. The parents who ate soooo afraid of the unvaccinated kid most likely ate themselves not vaccinated… And may never have been since when they were children some of the newly mandated ones did not exist. So shut the F up on get a clue. An unvaccinated child is not harming anyone. It is a FACT that a newly vaccinated person sheds the virus/ disease they’ve been shot up with and in my view putting unvaccinated at risk .. It’s pure speculation to assume if is irresponsible not to vaccinate … Mind your business get a clue. I think all you idiot shooting up your kids with nine shots in one drive by well baby visit are insane and idiotic for trusting so blindly. I have been given a wrong medication before and it cost Me dearly.. And that was by experts at johns Hopkins hospital.. So trust your insticts and quit judging people.
Um, do you anything other than “stories”, something like actual data? Because if it was true, there would be some kind of actual set of case series in the PubMed index. The VAERS information is not sufficient since it is unverified reports, please stick to papers that actually verify the connection. Thank you.
It might be useful if you actually read the article above with an open mind. It explains exactly how children were infected by an unvaccinated child.
This claim requires a scientific citation. Just post the journal, title and paper that verifies that the vaccines on the present pediatric schedule shed and put others at risk that is indexed in PubMed. Thank you in advance, because I keep seeing this claim but no one ever come back with the evidence.
Because the only two vaccines that used to do that are no longer on the pediatric schedule. That would have been the smallpox vaccine (which infected others with vaccinia, a form of cowpox), and OPV, the oral polio vaccine.
My instincts told me as a child that the earth is flat and the sun goes around it, but I have learned better. As far as judging people, I can only go by what you write.
The only thing I can judge is that you are reading information from people who don’t mind lying to you. Hence the title of this article. The glaring error is that vaccines are 100% effective, and ignoring the case of babies too young to be vaccinated or people with immune disorders. Another is the concept that recently vaccinated people are infectious.
If you think we are “wrong”, then it is up to you to provide real scientific evidence to show us where we are wrong. It has to be from a reliable source that is indexed in PubMed. That includes case reports, epidemiological studies and public health department reports. Do not expect us to take you statements without question.
Some examples include:
Impact of anti-vaccine movements on pertussis control: the untold story
Pediatrics. 2009 Jun;123(6):1446-51.
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I suppose you also believe the flu vaccine turned someone into the hulk.
An unvaccinated child infected with a disease very much is harming others (those too young to be vaccinated, those with a valid medical reason not to be vaccinated, those the vaccine doesn’t work on, etc along with those with parents as negligent as their own).
With the few vaccines where the vaccine is contagious what mostly happens is that those unvaccinated actually end up getting partially vaccinated by coming into contact with the vaccinated person.
Also as Chris mentions they aren’t used any more in much of the developed world.
Only if you can’t understand basic science would you think it speculation.
Our instincts are adapted to surviving in the savannahs of Africa with very limited technology and don’t necessarily translate well into a world based on science and technology (of course our brains are highly adaptable so we can overcome them, but it takes effort).
Speak for yourself hypocrite.
“those too young to be vaccinated, those with a valid medical reason not to be vaccinated, those the vaccine doesn’t work on”
Meaning the older unvaccinated child is not the only one putting your vaccinated children at risk.
I agree. Don’t judge.
No, but it is the one where negligence is causing the risk (and you don’t need everyone vaccinated to get herd immunity, just the vast majority, which we can get if people without a medical reason not to be vaccinated would stop f***ing opting out).
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My concern is that so many base their antivaccine views on the belief that they are sparing their children from autism or asthma. Call me crazy, but I believe all children are blessings from God, not just the ones without neurological problems. I’d rather have an otherwise healthy, living autistic child (that I may have to care for for the rest of my life) than a “normal” child who died from a preventable disease. I was just reading up on thimerosal, and even though it was removed from children’s vaccines in 2001, cases of autism continue to increase. I was concerned about vaccines and whether or not I should have my child vaccinated before he was born, and two things struck me: 1) the facts (including the one just noted) do not support vaccines being the cause of autism. Certainly there are more people today who choose not to vaccinate their children as there were in 2001, so why is the number of autism cases not declining? 2) I could never live with myself if my child contracted a preventable disease. Maybe autism is caused by what we’re putting into our children’s bodies, but how about we start looking at what parents are putting into their kids on a daily basis. How can anyone complain about what’s in a vaccine if they’re not equally as conscious about the crap they’re allowing their kids to eat and drink? Maybe its environmental factors, genetics, or something else. But with at least 20 studies done on the subject, all finding no connection to vaccines and autism, you’d think the case would be closed.
You’re incorrect. Jenny McCarthy and a few on the fringe insist vaccines cause asthma. Most non-vaxers and selective-vaxers do not think this and in fact get irritated when people like yourself declare that we do. Vaxing or not, both sides comes with sets of risks, and we have chosen the set we are more comfortable with. If your child were to get measles, there’d be a 1-2 chance in 1000 of death. Look up the chance of death in a vehicular accident and justify why you don’t think twice about putting your child in a car when public transit has a much lower death rate than riding in passenger vehicles, such as your car or truck.
Of course you get a lot more benefit from putting your kid in a car (ability to get them places they wouldn’t otherwise be able to get to) than from not vaccinating them (parent getting to feel self-righteous, though some parents value that above all else).
You could achieve the same benefit by taking public transit while cutting the chance of death (among other fantastic benefits).
That would require public transport to go where you want to go (and also run when you want to go).
Cars also aren’t as dangerous as many think they are (the death rates are very much skewed to drunk drivers, those who are sober or being driven by someone sober have much lower risk of dying in an accident than you’d expect if you just took the raw death rate for car transport).
Are vaccines causing more food allergies in our children?
First place you should check: http://www.pubmed.gov
My step daughter is unvaccinated and since I’ve been with her father, I’ve yet to see her 100% healthy. She contracted Pertussis 6 months ago and has had a persistent cough ever since. She also has bowel issues involving frequent diarrhea, mucusy stools, blood-tinged stools and gas. She even started having headaches recently. The issue is that even though her mother and father have 50/50 custody, she lives with her mother. She refuses to give her modern medicines and believes only in herbal and homeopathic medications.
We are constantly in fear that our child is going to hospitalized for these diseases and illness, or worse, and yet there seems to be NOTHING legally that we can do. Her school doesn’t require vaccinations, her doctors won’t vaccinate without both parent’s consent, and her mother is in complete control of diet. Is there any information, advice or ideas you have to help us gain at least some control of our daughter’s life? I know her mother believes she is doing the right thing, but our sick little girl proves otherwise. Please help us!
It would depend on where you are as to what you can do but petitinioning the court to transfer responsibility for medical care to the father might work (so far courts have tended to rule against quacks on such matters).
You’d probably need to speak to a lawyer specialising in custody matters in your jurisdiction for how to actually go about it.
http://volokh.com/2011/01/26/court-upholds-decision-giving-parent-authority-over-childs-medical-care-because-that-parent-would-immunize-the-child/
http://www.quackwatch.org/03HealthPromotion/immu/mmrappeal.html
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/victoria/court-orders-girl-5-to-have-her-jabs/story-e6frf7kx-1225988096060
all indicate that courts tend to side with those who are anti-disease.
“We do not ask that children be vaccinated solely to protect others, and it would be wrong if that was the case.We ask that children be vaccinated so, first and foremost, they would be protected.”
As my daughter’s mother, these decisions are mine and mine alone. Quit butting into my parenting space unless I have the right to demand you never put your child into a vehicle. I am more concerned about the number of children harmed in vehicle accidents that wouldn’t have happened if they weren’t allowed in cars and trucks, but it’s not my position to tell you not to put your child into a vehicle despite the higher chance of dying in a vehicle accident than IF your child actually caught the measles. It’s not my spot to tell you to never take your child to a hospital despite the 100,000 people a year who die from hospital-acquired infections.
You probably feel like you’re the good guy more concerned about my child than I am. Well you’re not. I, as my daughter’s mother, along with her father, have done our research and accepted the set of risks we feel more comfortable with. Since I have an autoimmune disorder and can not get vaccines myself (two separate doctors came to this conclusion), this isn’t a decision we made lightly, but it is the one WE, this child’s parents, are comfortable with. When illnesses go around, like whooping cough is right now, guess what. Our daughter and I stay home unless it’s absolutely necessary to go out. He goes to work, comes home, and changes promptly. We can’t eliminate the risks, but this is the set we are more comfortable with.
I would never dare to be self-centered enough to say that others should vaccinate their children for my sake. Part of living in America is accepting that freedom comes with others being allowed to make decisions we ourselves might not make. That goes for you too. The people who are pro-vax to the point they believe children should be removed if not vaxed have a very dangerous mindset. If the government were to have the power to mandate what we inject our children and ourselves with, where would it stop? Are you truly comfortable with the thought that a vaccine could be developed and rushed to market un a matter of months without long-term testing and you be mandated to receive it, like a guinea pig, and no right to sue if you are harmed by it? Are you comfortable with being forced to inject your daughters with Gardasil despite the harm, including deaths, that have led to it being banned in many European countries? Are you comfortable with the FDA, which thinks ammonia-sprayed beef byproducts and chemical-laced foods are so safe we have no right to know we’re eating it, deciding this sort of thing for us?
You’re obviously comfortable with spreading lies about vaccines, which makes me doubt the entirety of your story. When you grow up, get married and have real children, I suspect that you’ll be less cavalier about their health. In the meantime, cover your mouth when you cough, and wash your hands after you use the bathroom, just like your Mom keeps reminding you. You might think she’s a nag, but it’s for your own good.
Before I even finished this artical I have several problems. First if you can get sick from what you are vacinated aginst what is the point? I read an artical written my a lady who is very anti – non vaccination. Claiming her daughter who was sick in the ER with Mumps then also caught measles in the ER from an unvaccinated child. I am guessing her child was vaccinated for both. After reading several simillar stories I do wonder. ” Does it even matter?” You vaccinated your child so they would not catch this illness.. then my unvaccinated child came in contact with it… one would think your child would not get it. But the truth is that vaccines are not 100% effective even when not exposed to an un vaccinated person who contracted an ilness.
“Measles is an extremely contagious viral disease that, before the widespread use of measles vaccine, affected almost every child in the world.” It is amazing any of us where born, it would seem judging by the number of people in my family who had no vaccines ( parents, grandparents, greatgrand parents, great aunts and uncles….) That I was even born! They should have all died from measles!
“parents have to be held responsible, because they willingly choose to put the community at risk.” this is “also false” parents of unvaccinated children are not “held responcible” for the ilness of the unvaccinated. I like this argument tho it just makes me want to ask.. if you come in contact with the virus and become ill anyway, How is that my fault?
I also hear that unvaccinated children can harber an illness with out becoming sick, or become immune. But if the virus is still in their system it can still spread. But isn’t that the way it goes with any illness? Maybe not. They do say things can spread before symptions present.
Its good to see all the view points and make your own choices, But after many months of research and talking to nurses, I have come to the conclusion that I wish my mother had listened to my father 27 years ago and not vaccinated me. Althought I am in good health and am very rarley ill. I do not know if I will vaccinate my children or not yet. But chances are I will not.
So how to keep measles away from a baby who is under a year old before they can get the MMR?
What part of the vaccine does not work for everyone (about 1 to 5%) or that measles is contagious before symptoms did you not understand? Or that measles is both very contagious and dangerous did you not understand?
In that case only 1-5% of the vaccinated will become contract the measles from an unvaccinated child. The parents of the vaccinated child have very little to fear then. And if i read correctly this person did mention that some diese is contagious before symptions appear. I am not vaccinated. And can not even remember the last time I had a cold. I am an annomally.
Is it also not true that a person can be fighting an illness and never present symptions, yet still infect others?
An artical I think you all should read. You may also want to look up these studies on your own. And if you know german read the newsletter.
There is much proof that unvaccinated childern are healthier. Please also ( on your own so you know the trusted source it came from rather than relying on this post and wondering where the info came from. ) Look at the information on the problems vaccinations cause.
Also, what scares me more than anything the pro vaccine people wrote about the unvaccinated is that there is a link between autisem 1 in 88 children have some form of autism. Autism is preventable in most cases.
Here is the link to the artical I refered to earlier. http://www.whale.to/vaccine/unvax.html
Unvaccinated children die more often than vaccinated children, how is that more healthy?
As for the problems vaccines cause, I hear someone got turned into the hulk by a flu vaccine, though haven’t heard of any autism cases caused by vaccines (not that it matters).
Scopie’s Law:
(Also, Alex/A whatever, get a spellchecker, the word is spelled “article”)
I just want to make sure you all know that vaccines do not prevent the illness 100% and once one child is sick, it can be passed on to others. I myself was vaccinated for whooping cough as a child. Then when i was 20 someone in my work place (also vaccinated) became ill with a terrible case of the mumps. Everone was required by the company to recive a new vaccination. MMR. A few weeks later I became very ill with Whooping Cough. It was terrible. I asked the doctors about it but then concluded that if I had a recent booster then the tests must be incorrect it must not be whooping cough but rather something acting like it.
I’m confused. Are you saying that your doctor thought your MMR booster should have protected you from whooping cough?
I don’t have children, and one of the reasons I’m glad about that is the vaccination dilemma. I’m not anti-vaccine. In its purest form, it may be a reasonable thing to do. The problems – and there are problems – seem to be a) the amount of vaccines very young children are now being exposed to, b) the amount of crap that’s IN the vaccines, along with the vaccine itself, and c) the cover-up – and there is a cover-up – about the number of children/babies damaged by the vaccines.
It made headlines when little Leo Blair received the mmr ONE SHOT AT A TIME – despite Tony loudly trumpeting the three-in-one shot was perfectly safe.
Western medicine gets some very basic things wrong. It took them years to accept that you should wash your hands before examining women in labour, to prevent puerperal fever. It took them up to sixty years to ‘provably’ find a correlation between smoking and cancer. I wouldn’t trust them on their statements that there’s no correlation between vaccines and autism, say – let alone the other illnesses children are suffering now after vaccination.
And let’s not forget that they are hand-in-glove with the billion dollar drug companies. That’s not exactly an unassailable moral position to be in. There are so many stories now about children damaged after vaccinations. I personally know one family who received compensation, and an admssion that the vaccines were to blame, after their child was left badly brain-damaged after a second lot of shots. That was over thirty years ago. Nowadays, that family probably wouldn’t have received the compensation nor the admission, if some of the stories you read are true.
Why not keep providing the necessary shots, but take out a lot of the crap (usually preservatives?) that’s in them; and space them further apart. (And forget the three-in-one crap.) It seems that the only reason they’re NOT doing this is …. all together now – MONEY! Why deprive a billion dollar, bully-boy industry of more sheckels to rub together? when the only people who’re paying the price now are a few hundred thousand children or so … more, if there IS a connection between autisim and the mmr ….
So maybe stop demonising those who haven’t vaccinated their children, and start demonising the drug companies – who could easily provide a safer, more spaced vaccination ‘programme’ – but won’t, because, hey – that would cost too much money…
Instead, they keep discovering more and more vaccinations – and more and more ‘guinea pigs’ – aka the children who are damaged by the ‘serums’ – seem to be paying the price.
On a), vaccines aren’t a very big load on the immune system compared with what the children get naturally from germs around the environment (and the vaccines are weakened so as to be considerably less harmful).
On b), what crap? There isn’t anything dangerous being put into vaccines along with the active ingredients (and if they need preservatives to not become dangerous or ineffective then they damn well should have them, it’s not like we’re using dangerous substances for that purpose).
On c), what cover-up?
Oh and you might want to read http://depletedcranium.com/smoking-and-cancer-how-did-we-miss-that-one-or-did-we/ on how western medicine figured out what smoking did a lot earlier than you, it’s almost as if the scientists had working brains (which sadly you appear to lack).
It is also sad how faceless anons berate others for asking questions. If we all blindly followed others the world would be a sad place. This woman asked some questions and you faceless anon belittled her.
I am sorry Chloe for this faceless individuals lack of compassion. I fall in the middle of the debate. I give most vaccines with the exception of a few. I research them myself and talk to a number of doctors about each vaccine. I also read the full inserts on the vaccines and pubmed articles, ect. I am educated and well informed on the subject.
It is people like this anon that ruin the whole vaccine debate. HE/SHE is the one lacking working brains to treat another person with that type of disregard. Hence why he is ashamed to show who he really is. Ignore anyone who isn’t comfortable enough showing their face.
Then you will have no trouble answering my two simple questions:
1. What must you read and understand on the official VAERS website before using the VAERS database? Please state what you must read and understand before clicking on the button.
2. What is the cost difference between treating measles versus preventing measles in a population? Be sure to show citations that are comparable to this:
J Infect Dis. 2004 May 1;189 Suppl 1:S131-45.
An economic analysis of the current universal 2-dose measles-mumps-rubella vaccination program in the United States.
“I also read the full inserts on the vaccines and pubmed articles, ect. I am educated and well informed on the subject.”
Thank you! I’m so sick of people like Chloe claiming that there’s a coverup of vaccine risks. As you demonstrate, the risks are spelled out on the vaccine inserts – a pretty feeble coverup, eh?