Death toll from the American anti-vaccine movement

[AliceWeir]

I understand why parents are afraid for their children. As a parent myself, we all share such fears. However - I saw the children of two of my own siblings, otherwise healthy toddlers at the time, go into seizures and have to be hospitalized within mere days of receiving the scheduled MMWR vaccines. One had to be Mediva 'd out to a specialty pediatric hospital. Fortunately, both children survived.

I had questions about vaccine safety even before these events, but this settled in my mind. Some children SHOULD be allowed to take advantage of herd immunity, and the evidence strongly pointed toward my own being some of those. In return, I endured lectures and preachments from various officials over several years, though none were medically qualified in the field of Immunology. My own grew up ok as well, and probably thanks to the very herd immunity provided by other children who were vaccinated. My thanks for that.

The main issue, to my mind, is still the use of live vaccine. Live vaccine IS known to cause adverse reaction in a percentage of patients. It’s used simply because live vaccine is quicker and cheaper to produce. And that’s not ok. Nobody - including even the otherwise well-intentioned posters here, and certainly not the government, have the right to place anyone else’s children at such risk, even if that risk is relatively small, statistically-speaking. Not over money, and certainly not over the profits of corporations. We’re talking children here - not ‘somebody else’s’ tough noogies when it goes so very tragically wrong and a child pays the price. I’m perfectly fine with everyone making their own decisions. But, if you claim to want greater immune status for the entire community, then…demand that it be provided in the safest manner possible!

And, FWIW - these safety concerns were around long before Jenny McCarthy or Andrew Wakefield had breathed a word on the subject. You just didn’t know it, because you had no reason to go find out before then.

[Ygret]

So a kid dies from hepatitis so every kid should be vaccinated. Is there really a potential hepatitis epidemic among all children? Really? Just because we have vaccines doesn’t mean we need to use all of them al the time. The flu vaccine is a case in point. A yearly vaccine for the flu may be useful for immune compromised individuals, but can actually be harmful to society as a whole. For most of us contracting the flu actually helps maintain the robustness of our immune systems.

And to state what I thought was obvious in my post, I am not “anti-vaccination”. My main point in addition to my question of the number of vaccines children receive was to point out that the healthcare “industry” has done itself no favors with regard to all the conflicts of interest and sleazy business dealings it has engaged in. Trust is lacking. And yes, there is a question as to whether some doctors who do work for the CDC have financial interests in some of the medicines they are promoting. Doctors should be free from the taint of such conflicts if they want to be seen as honest. Lawyers and judges are supposed to recuse themselves if they have financial interests that touch the parties in a dispute. Why should the bar be lower for doctors?

My suspicion of the large growth in the number of vaccines is directly related to my distrust of the pharma and healthcare industry as a whole. I know, I should put on my tinfoil hat. Sure. And yet the scandals keep coming.

[Medievalist]

Your answer is better than mine. Thanks. I get too riled up by the rhetoric.

[Ereiamjh]

@Aloisius

Surely this exists in other states?

Here it does at least, in Illinois you have to have your car pass an emissions test every two years. I think it’s a good thing. I’ve had a couple pretty junky old cars that were able to pass repeatedly so I don’t think it’s too onerous on drivers. If your car fails it’s probably doing some serious polluting.

[hancocks]

@ethicalcannibal: I don’t mind at all being wrong, happens all the time. But make a case. Hand-waving and saying “and you’d be wrong” doesn’t make a case, it makes a statement. Please do explain to me how I"m wrong and I’m happy to listen. If I’m wrong in this case, it means that: 23 vaccinations are a “drop in the bucket” for everyone? Science and medicine already say that’s not true (as far as compromised immune systems are concerned).

@AliceWeir: very nicely said. Thank you.

[Ygret]

I would feel a lot better about vaccines if governments and heath organizations were more up front about the dangers they pose to an admittedly very small group of children. It would be nice for them to try to actually figure out why some children die or are poisoned from vaccines, and if there is a way to avoid such deaths. The reactions we get instead are ridicule and denial that there is even a problem. It seems to be more of an effort to corral people into compliance than to have an open discussion about what may not seem serious to those who haven’t lost a child to a vaccine, but is of utmost importance to those who have. Health professionals are more frightened of people shying away from vaccines so denial is the default response. Instead, we could have an open discussion that explains the percentage of children that are harmed by vaccines, how its far more likely to get hurt by not having a particular vaccine, backed up by research and clear statistics, and active efforts to figure out why some children react so poorly to them so we can avoid such tragedies in the future. Mocking, ridiculing and sidelining of concerns just feeds into the feeling of conspiracy. The CDC itself has statistics on the numbers of children harmed or killed by vaccines. It would be nice to see follow up on why this happens. Especially since the number and frequency of recommended vaccines keeps rising. Is that not a fair request?

[richp10]

Nearly all vaccines present some risk and will harm a small proportion of people. These proportions are well understood (look up NNT & NNH) and are fundamental to decisions whether to recommend a vaccine be rolled out. The precise balance of risk / benefit varies for different vaccines and it is also right that the seriousness of the condition being protected against is taken into consideration. So for example, we should be prepared to accept a higher level of risk for a smallpox vaccine compared to a chickenpox vaccine.

The reasons why an individual child might might be harmed will not always be known - almost every medical intervention carries some risk to some individuals, often due to genetic differences. Even if these risks can be quantified at a population level they cannot be entirely removed at the level of the individual. You ask for the risks to be ‘followed up’ - as if researchers are not trying to develop the safest vaccines they can. Thankfully, any Pharma company that develops a replacement vaccine that is safer and more effective will get market share - thousands of research scientists spend their working lives trying to work out why harm sometimes results and how to do better.

It is also the case though, that it is rarely possible to attribute a particular individual illness to a vaccine even if there is a known risk at a population level. People often think they can spot serious harm caused by vaccines to an individual, they are almost always wrong - you need very big sample sizes to detect harm from such safe interventions.

There are thousands of parents whose kids had MMR and then developed Autism; they believe that MMR caused Autism but they are (to a reasonable degree of certainty) utterly and totally wrong - this is just a proximity bias, our brains are hard wired to miss-attribute causality in this way. They deserve compassion not ridicule, but their miss-perception should not be used as the basis for an argument to undermine one of the best Public Health measures available. It is just a co-incidence that MMR tends to be given at a similar age when Autism gets diagnosed, there are now dozens of high quality studies showing there is no causal relationship at all. The parents are wrong and Andrew Wakefield is no long able to practice medicine.

Many vaccines will harm a few people, but a vaccine is only made available for general usage if the evidence is robust that the benefits far outweigh the harms. These are not just ‘slighly’ effective interventions, taken as a whole they are massively beneficial and the risks of harm small and exceedingly rare.

Even though some people are harmed by vaccines, the net level of harm is greatly reduced if more people are vaccinated rather than less. The problem is that this is a hard concept for many people to grasp, it seems paradoxical. Nudged by rumors and paranoia, they latch onto the first few words of that sentence and conclude “if some people are harmed there is no way I will give that to my child”.

The other complexity is that there is a tension between the individual and collective good. Your best option is to make sure everyone else vaccinates their children but not have your own children vaccinated. Then, you avoid the tiny risks of harm that vaccination entails, but avoid all the horrible diseases that cannot spread due to herd immunity. Where this falls apart, of course is when everyone else follows the same strategy - herd immunity collapses and your own child becomes vulnerable. This is what is happening, right now.

This is a bogus health scare, spreading fear and leaving disease in it’s wake. If a neighbors child had Polio, few informed people would choose not to vaccinate.

The only thing standing in the way of wiping out polio is anti-vax rhetoric, now narrowed to a particularly virulent form spread by religious leaders in some rural corners of Africa and Asia. It’s the same rubbish as you will find in Seattle though.

There is no conspiracy, an understanding of vaccination is available if you do the research and the anti-vaccination movement is ignorant, selfish, paranoid nonsense. Of course otherwise thoughtful, sensible, caring and considered people can at times can drawn into irrationality so ridicule is not the best way to respond and I don’t mean those words as a personal attack!

Take care (and vaccinate your kids…)

R

[richp10]

Oh, and if anyone has not read it, the Wikipedia page on the MMR Hoax is well worth a read. Seriously, you could not make this stuff up… You need to see the ‘doubts’ about vaccination in this discussion thread within their it’s historical context - they are the after ripples of fraud and hoax.

MMR vaccine and autism

[GilbertWham]

Presumably, we can study those multi-generational effects in the multiple generations who’ve already been vaccinated, no? And, as another voice chiming in here, why the hell can’t one be worried about more than one threat to public health at a time? I assure you, it is perfectly possible to be worried about pollution/whatever bugbear you choose, and consider the anti-vaxxer movement to be deluded and dangerous.

And what about the kids of anti-vaxxers who can/are damaged by their parents’ beliefs? My chest is fucked due to contracting preventable childhood diseases because my mother believes this kind of horseshit. My brother refuses to talk to her, as she was so strident about her not wanting him to get his kids vaccinated. It’s not ‘hate mongering’ OR ‘fascist’ to say that not vaccinating large tranches of the populace due to some patently false ‘evidence’ gaining traction is dangerous to society as a whole. Because it is dangerous. Our reliance on fossil fuels is dangerous too. We should do something about both these things. We shouldn’t say, ‘it is wrong to label this as a bad idea when all the evidence points to it being so, because we all drive cars’.

‘No, you are wrong, and what you are doing is putting the lives of yours and other’s children at risk’ != ‘hatemongering’

[Medievalist]

Absolutely the multigenerational effects of vaccination should be studied. However, I don’t believe there are multiple generations that have had the same vaccination formulations as are used today. My children were born only three years apart and they didn’t get the same vaccines - it’s my policy to try to read all available data on anything that any doctor proposes to inject in my children, so I know this for a fact. Still, I support your call for research.

I am vaccinated, as are my children, as I’ve mentioned multiple times.

I am not making any defense of Jenny McCarthy or any other anti-vax hysteria spreader.

I didn’t say everyone here was hatemongering. But there’s always plenty of it in any BB vaccination thread - look above and see the words “strangle” and “put them out the airlock”.

I’m sorry your parents did not make the decisions you wanted them to. Mine didn’t either, and that is simply something you and I will have to live with. And even though my parents vaccinated me I have suffered from chest issues at various times throughout my life, including chronic childhood bronchitis and near-lethal spontaneous lung collapse as an adult - I am living proof vaccination would not have guaranteed you perfect lungs, so try not to resent your Mom too much. Sometimes they harm us out of love.

And finally, pretending that I am asking people to only worry about one thing at a time is either a cheap rhetorical trick or a complete misunderstanding of my point; quite the opposite, I’m saying we all need to be worried about a lot more stuff than vaccination issues. Nearly all of us are individually doing things that are more harmful to the rest of humanity and the world than what individual anti-vaxxers are doing. I used the example of pollution, which is the cause of global warming, and a million other health hazards. Pollution is something nearly everyone can personally do something about without attacking anyone else’s belief system or family structure.

If you have a quarter acre of lawn, and you use a gasoline push lawn mower, you are paying more money to use an inferior machine that uses up more of your time - just so you won’t have to learn how to manage a cheaper, easier to maintain corded electric mower. This bad choice is at least as harmful to the world and to humanity as the bad choices of anti-vaxxers. I suppose I could have given you other examples, but pollution is the one I chose. I hope you will consider it instead of just discarding it as an impediment to continuing castigation of anti-vaxxers.

[fireshadow]

@Medievalist

Nearly all of us are individually doing things that are more harmful to the rest of humanity and the world than what individual anti-vaxxers are doing. I used the example of pollution, which is the cause of global warming, and a million other health hazards.

As you point out, nearly everyone contributes to the problem of pollution. What would happen if everyone decided to stop vaccinating? How many people would be dying then?

[anon50609448]

Your argument is results-based thinking at its purest. We know that if everyone is vaccinated then fewer people will die. We know that if we vaccinate your child your child is less likely to die.

Your very extensive argument comes down to saying that sometimes children will die. But we all knew that. If I let my toddler play in the street I may get her hit by a car, but maybe a car was about to go off the road and crash into the sidewalk and by letting her play in the middle of the street I saved her life!

[anon50609448]

Okay, now show us how being anti-vaxx causes massive reductions in pollution and your argument will be complete!

[anon50609448]

Wakefield also actually falsified the data. His research linking vaccines to autism was outright fraud.

[anon50609448]

If your goal is to try to get people to be less aggressive towards those they disagree with then it might be wise to lead by example. Calling people who are express their frustration with anti-vaxxers hyperbolically cowards isn’t a great way to build the dialogue you appear to want.

[Medievalist]

You’re right. I get annoyed and fight fire with fire, when it’s nearly always better to fight fire with water. I plead guilty and beg your forbearance.

[bolamig]

In between “vaccines are good all around” and “all vaccines are the spawn of the devil”, there is a field. Lets meet there.

I used to get a flu shot every year figuring there’s no downside, but there really are plenty of downsides to vaccination. And the science is nowhere near as settled as people would have you believe.

Before taking an overseas trip, I started researching what vaccinations to get. For diseases that primarily occur overseas, there are quite a number of conditions that can disqualify me from the CDC’s guidelines and cause me not benefit from a travel immunization. But strangely for the diseases that happen here in the USA the CDC generally says “don’t worry just vaccinate”.

Our government gives extremely poor nutrition advice, largely because the meat industry has the biggest lobbying funds. I simply don’t trust my government on scientific issues, because the decisionmaking process in the government is not scientific; it’s financial.

So yes, we are back to the reality that some vaccines are problematic for some people some of the time. If you disagree then please show me the science. Explain to me why everyone isn’t getting hep A and B all the time if vaccines are so safe. Honestly, I don’t know the details myself; all I know is that some powers up above have decided MMR Yes, Hep No.

And for those of you who think this is all settled science, Please tell me how long my immunizations last. I read different experts saying I should get a booster after 10 years and others saying I’m good for life. There is no authority who can tell me when I need to get a booster; I have to make my own judgement calls about that myself.

Add in the precautionary principle and I’m avoiding vaccinations as much as possible.

[anon50609448]

I’m not an expert on vaccines, but you seem to be making some false assumptions. There are a number of reasons we get some vaccines and not others. How safe those vaccines are, how large the threat is, how much they cost to produce, whether it was a hot media issue at some point; all might play into that decision. Vaccines don’t carry the same risk or last the same amount of time. Some are basically lifelong, some only last a few months.

When I was in university I was vaccinated for Meningitis because there was a Meningitis outbreak. They don’t vaccinate everyone for that because the vaccine is unacceptably dangerous compared to the risk of getting the disease. But when there is an outbreak in your town and you are a university student, they vaccinate you because suddenly the chance of getting Meningitis is much higher and it is a very dangerous disease.

I don’t know why we aren’t vaccinated for Hep A and B, but it is probably a similar calculation. The chance of getting the diseases in Canada, the US and western Europe is low, so perhaps the cost or risk outweighs the benefit (or perhaps it doesn’t and we don’t get the vaccine because governments are short-sighted and cheap). It could be that the vaccine doesn’t last that long. It could also be because those diseases aren’t big child killers, and mandatory vaccines are directed far more at children’s diseases.

I’ve read that the value of the flu shot is highly questionable, but the very fact that I’ve read that gives me a lot of confidence in the MMR vaccine (also the way these diseases came back when anti-vaxx became popular). Doctors and nurses aren’t perfect but the majority of them are trying to do the best thing for their patients. They understand that treatments have risks and that you have to weigh the risks and benefits.

[kuangmk11]

This is the new natural selection.