Death toll from the American anti-vaccine movement

boing
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“Why have the number and frequency of vaccines more than quintupled since the 1970’s?”

Well, they have not. Or rather this sentence is muddling separate concepts.

The number of recommended childhood vaccines has doubled from 1970 to today. The common childhood vaccines also doubled from 1930 to 1970 (looks like maybe there was no official schedule in the 30’s, but 3 routine vaccines were available). The increase from 1890 to 1930 was infinite, as it started from zero.

There are more vaccines now because we have learned how to create more vaccines, improved some vaccines so they can be given to everyone, and in at least one case found that immunizing only part of the population did not work well and switched to giving it to everyone.

The number of doses is up a lot more at the moment both because there are more vaccines and because we are currently at something of a low point in combining all the new vaccines into fewer shots. Most of them are separate shots with their own schedules. Also the flu vaccine changes every year.

Sounds like we are in the process of combining some of the new vaccines, but the separate ones are still being used a lot so it may well be that ten years from now the shot schedule will be significantly smaller.

From 1914 to 1938 the first three routine vaccines were developed and spread.
In 1940 there were 4 officially recommended vaccines in the US.
In the 1960’s there were 8
In the 1970’s 7 (smallpox had been eradicated)
In the late 90’s there were 9.
In 2010 there were 14.

http://www.chop.edu/service/vaccine-education-center/vaccine-schedule/history-of-vaccine-schedule.html

Don’t know why you think 25 or so shots is “insane”. The sister of an elementary school friend of mine with died of hepatitis at about 10 years old. Risking that is insane. More trivially virtually everyone when I was a kid got chickenpox, which seemed a heck of a lot more unpleasant than 20 shots (lucky me, I got it when I was almost 3 and don’t remember, my sister got it when she was < 1 and then got to have shingles when she was in highschool).

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For the overwhelmingly vast majority of things the truth (or best known approximation) is what the scientists say.

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Can’t remember his name either. Unfortunately it was published in the (respected) Lancet, but then immediately discredited, disowned and scrapped. This is the big “gotcha” thing that all these anti-vaxxers ran with. Nobody thinks it’s legit. It’s basically like climate science, a few hacks representing .01% of science are spreading misinformation so there’s still an “argument”, even though there really isn’t one…

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If it’s OK to be down on people for nebulous damage to notional concepts that might in a few cases actually cause harm, shouldn’t I be totally kicking you in the nuts right now for driving a car and overheating your home? This is not a joke; I’m responding to your remark about wanting to kill anti-vaxxers with your bare hands for weakening “herd immunity”.

You, yourself, also do avoidable damage to others and, in my opinion, your reasons are no more defensible than those of anti-vaxxers. You’d probably survive just fine if your house was heated to 45 degrees Fahrenheit all winter (all you really need to do is prevent your pipes from freezing) and overheating your house is not just rhetorically killing people it’s literally killing people through the direct action of pollution-related diseases like lung cancer.

You, and Cory, like to hammer at the “herd immunity” meme as though it is your god-given right to force other people to trust in corporate medicine as part of the social contract. Yet you drive cars, which are clearly PROVEN to cause harm to my family by increasing the rates of cancer, and use polluting power sources to service trivial whims and unnecessary luxuries.

To put it another way: Remove the beam from your own eye before you criticise the mote in another’s.

I’m not an anti-vaxxer and my children are all immunized. But anti-vaxxers are among the least of the world’s problems, and if they reduce the population they might in fact be human race’s best friends - we won’t know until the game of blood and dust is complete.

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Please be civil, everyone.

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Amen, when people’s selfishness and unwillingness to work with others threatens the health of the rest of society it’s time to put them out the airlock.

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If you think anti-vaccination movements have any impact on the population, it’s obviously because it allows people to fall ill and die. Now tell me, is reducing our population important enough to euthanize random people? Because that’s basically how disease works, except it focuses on groups like children and gives them horrible painful deaths instead.

Maybe instead of looking at population as a statistic, you might remember it’s made out of people.

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Ignoring the false equivalencies, I do have to make some criticisms of your post from an engineering perspective. First and foremost, the biggest problem you are writing about is consumer residential heating? This implies you have no idea on how pollutants that are toxic to humans are generated. If you care about pollutants you should care about coal and older diesel engines. Natural gas (for power or heating), nuclear power, and renewables do not produce significant pollutants. Second, even if everything is coal powered, you failed to focus on where the power goes and how much of it is used for various purposes. Only about a third of power is residential, and most houses don’t use electricity for heating. Third, even if a house uses coal derived electricity for heating, it doesn’t have to maintain the temperature of a refrigerator. Proper insulation may mean bigger gains in efficiency than reducing the delta-T.

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Perhaps you might be thinking about the Koch brothers’ “politically charitable” experiments in eugenics?

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It’s true that not all vaccines are safe for everyone - for example, some people are allergic to some components of some vaccines. Tomatoes aren’t safe for everyone either.

Measles also isn’t safe for everyone. It turns out, it’s safe for a lot less people than the vaccine for it is.

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Cars are regulated for pollution, are they not? This is where your argument fails. Pollution is regulated for the good of humanity. Pollution controls are mandatory on almost every type of technology imaginable. Thus, your argument that we can’t mandate vaccines is what?

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They probably want to get rid of the conspiracy theorists too!

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On a related topic, how exactly does a clinical trial begin? Is the need/desire to begin one have its origin within the medical/scientific community, or have there ever been trials that have been recommended by a layman?

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I have an idea, rather than dignify the anti-vaxx “theory” with a response, why don’t I run you through what happens when you live in an area where a significant number of folks don’t get the MMR for their kids for two generations.

I had a family come in with a cough. Guess what? Whooping cough. Three kids, mom and dad, all down with whooping cough. They were working class, with both parents supporting the kids. Kids had to be pulled out of school, and both parents had to be off work for a little bit. For them, that was debilitating. The doc I worked for, wrote five scripts for antibiotics. Since this is the US, no insurance. The first round of perscriptions was about $100 each. The doc scrambled to find an alternative treatment for treatment that would cost less. We got it down in price, using an older antibiotic that would be harder on the stomach, require far more days to take, and risk compliance in the long run.

Mom, Dad, and two kids were fine, but the youngest had complications that landed them in the ER, and admitted. Nothing terrible, and the kid was fine, but now we have two adults off work, kids out of school, costs for treatment, and a hospital stay.

I remember the mother telling me if she had known how many thousands of dollars this was going to cost them, and how risky it was for her youngest, she would have gotten the MMR immediately. But as I’ve said, I live in one of the higher levels of unvaxxed groups. Whooping cough goes around regularly.

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Yes, and I hold to it. Anybody trying to “teach the controversy” about vaccinations is trying to spread misinformation. This is not an ad hom or an insult. You should be ashamed. Reflect on your thoughts, compose a rational statement, and then return. Stop lashing out.

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I don’t know what we’re yelling about!!

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See also: Typhoid Mary

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bzishi: I’m sure that the CDC is very ashamed about the controversy they are teaching. You should email them and advise them that based on your personal opinion they really should take a time out and do some reflection.

Read my original post. If clarifying facts constitutes “teaching controversy” then we have clearly left the arena of the logical and entered the land of the crazy emotional knee jerk reaction. Which ironically is what I referred to in my original post and was hoping we could avoid since everyone here prides themselves on being so scientific.

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Oh, boy, here we go again (and again and again).

  1. Some vaccines are probably great, for most people.
  2. Not all vaccines are right for all people.
  3. Imagining that all vaccine companies are altruists is a bit of a limited thought.
  4. There are vaccines that should not see the light of day. Anthrax?

It seems that the big hoopla is around people being damaged by vaccines. OK, let’s go down that road. It’s kind of a state machine (sorry for any repeats from above).

  1. If all vaccines were incredibly useful for public health and absolutely 100% non-harmful for all, then why shouldn’t everyone take them? (Money aside.)
  2. Since #1 is not true (“everyone” admits that: some vaccines are harmful for some people), then not everyone should take them.
  3. And here’s the crux: which vaccines hurt which people, and to what extent, and why, and what are the harm vectors?
  4. With very few broadly-brushed exceptions, WE DON’T KNOW. We know that people with compromised immune systems should NOT take vaccines. At least, this is what we hear from scientists/medical people and companies that manufacture the vaccines themselves.

At this point, this is where I part ways with the “everyone should get them” and “no one should get them” people. Mandating that everyone should get them means you’re going to kill “a few” and maim “some”. Yes, plenty of people say, “oh, well, that’s the way it goes”. Great answer (sardonically speaking), unless it’s your kid who “gets it”, so to speak.

I personally am not highly interested in the type of harm, whether it be autism, brain damage, some other type of physical or neurological harm, or death. The part I’m the most interested in is science and medicine spending time and money to sort out how to make accurate determinations, whether based on genetic or other testing, on who is going to get hurt, and by which vaccines. Perhaps there are those who are already immune to a disease (for any number of reasons - genetic inheritance, previous exposure to the pathogen and thus already developed antibodies, etc) who should not be given the vaccine because…they can’t get that disease (and that would have to include not becoming a carrier either, I get that).

So:

Perfect world: they test “you”, (or your infant), and out comes the determination:

  • Whooping cough - you’re immune and can’t be a carrier for whatever reason. “No vaccine for you!”
  • Measels - if you get measels, you’ll get really mangled. Vaccine is safe for you, however - you won’t even get a fever. That one you get.
  • Chicken pox. If you get the wild disease, you will (predictably, because we now have all this great science) get moderatly sick. You will be a carrier for a time. You live in a city. Probably you should get this. The vaccine has been determined to be non-damaging to your profile.
  • Rubella. If you get rubella, you will be moderately sick. However, the only vaccine we currently have will turn you into a zucchini and you will be a neurological mess and have to be cared for for the rest of your life. “No vaccine for you, EVER!” Unless they develop a different and less- or non-harmful version, perhaps.

Etc. etc. etc. Including, your kid should take this one, but only after he/she is five years old, not pre-one year. Stuff like that.

While pretty much all of this stuff does not exist today (in terms of harm vectors from vaccines as well as the diseases), IT SHOULD. And it’s going to, someday. But someone has to want to put in the time and money to chase this stuff. Doubtless research like this is in play, but I’m betting not a lot.

So, what’s going to happen here, now, and is happening, is this:

  • Some people will never vaccinate their children
  • some of these parents will dodge a huge bullet because they followed this track, and their kid was effectively saved because they did not do this.
  • some of these parents will lose a child, or have a child become severely impacted, because they followed this track and their son got a disease (say, measels) and lost their hearing, or was impacted in some other way
  • some parents will have children who get sick from contact with other children who are carrying a disease because they were not vaccinated (and why weren’t their children vaccinated, a good question right there)
  • some parents will have children who will get sick even though they thought they were protected because the vaccines are not massively effective with all people. Way to test for that? Perhaps, perhaps not. You can do titers and things to try to evaluate this, but I’m far from the expert and don’t understand the quantification here.

Now that I’ve beat this horse to death (who was unvaccinated against my beating), I’ll reiterate my main point: there is not enough science and knowledge for all concerned regarding this issue, today. And, IMO, not enough energy going into sorting out the gory details as described above. But there needs to be.

We, as parents (me, too) have to make our choices as we see fit, and live with them. I’m happy to make those choices for my children as best as I can, based on the science as we understand it today, but at the end of the day as it sits today it’s still a bit of a crapshoot.

You could say that about life in general, tho’, now couldn’t you?

Cheers…

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