The science of vaccine denial

Do you have a citation for the vaccine court being the sole avenue for redress? I know that it’s pretty universally used because it has reduced burdens of proof and is generous with legal fees for plaintiffs.

However, I’ve not seen anything that states that suit is barred in other courts if the vaccine is “mislabeled” (in the legal sense of, very roughly, having incorrect package inserts) or having a manufacturing defect.

1 Like

Any estimates of how much damage you’d have taken from a full-blown case of measles? Basically the same virus, orders of magnitude higher viral load, higher fevers, longer duration. Plus, of course, all of the other risks such as pneumonia, encephalitis, SSPE, etc.

2 Likes

It’s not just putting kids at risk: I’m a 32 year old woman at risk.

I went into anaphylactic shock after receiving the DDP shot as a toddler because of the Pertussis vaccine, aka whooping cough, and I haven’t had it since, for obvious reasons. There have been a couple of whooping cough outbreaks in Houston, TX (where I live), and so I have to avoid kids who are coughing in public during the winter, when the outbreaks flare up.

Getting whooping cough could potentially kill me, particularly as I have a few autoimmune disorders as a result of leukemia and chemotherapy as a teenager.

3 Likes

Check with your doc about the newer (acellular) pertussis vaccine. Much lower load of secondary antigens. The switch changed the pertussis vaccine from one with pretty nasty side effects to pretty much “meh.”

1 Like

I’m also probably at risk… Need to go get my booster shot.
I am from the tail end of that 1960’s less than effective measles vaccine.
California measles cases:

1 Like

This is right on the money. What frustrates me is that the profit-motive link doesn’t make any sense with vaccines. Big pharma wants to create maintenance drugs to manage the symptoms of life-long disease so that you have to keep paying for the drugs every day. They don’t want to sell vaccines that people take once as infants and then never have to pay for again. If measles was endemic then big pharma would make a lot more money selling treatments than they do selling vaccines.

The class war makes perfect sense to me, but wow are vaccines the wrong target.

Most people cross the street with a firm sense of immortality. Here’s the issue with informed decision makers: What are the odds that you actually have anything to contribute to the discussion of whether it is a good idea to vaccinate? These are decisions made by aggregates of doctors with specializations in the area. You are extremely unlikely to be informed on the issue without a medical degree. If the doctors say vaccination is better and you think it is not then we are left with three possibilities:

  1. The doctors are right, you are being a fool
  2. The doctors are wrong, you somehow noticed something no one else did
  3. The doctors are lying, it’s a conspiracy

Option (2) is so drastically implausible that almost everyone goes with 1 or 3. I’m prone to ask questions and want to know the facts for myself about nearly everything, but with vaccinations I’m tired of the questions being asked. The question everyone ought to be asking is, “Holy shit, it’s 2015 and I’m picking a public school based on the vaccination rate of kids there? What the hell is going on?”

People did a lot of things before the 17th century, and now we know how to do a lot of those things better than we did before. Science isn’t magic, it’s just the best method yet for determining the truth about reality. One day we might come up with an even better method for doing so, but “thinking it out for yourself” is drastically inferior to “examining the evidence from repeatable experiments” if you actually want to know things. I don’t doubt that there are people in the world whose thinking-it-out ability is so far above average and whose understand-other-people ability is so far below average that it makes more sense for them to go with what they think that it does to go with scientific consensus, but they would have to be quite rare.

In fact, it’s almost certainly got to be the opposite of true. The reason science is effective is because it gives us something objective to rely on instead of having to rely on our own dumb ideas (or accept, blindly, the ideas of someone else). I’m sure there are plenty of self-righteous assholes in science, but if the chemistry department and the philosophy department go head-to-head in the self-righteous asshole olympics, philosophy is going to take home all the medals.

4 Likes

When everyone but you is vaccinated, probably everyone including you is safe. So if I think (or Know) something scary about getting vaccinated and don’t – no problem! But when a significant number of the herd is unvaccinated, there’s a problem. The CDC is in the business of, well, disease control. Their main tool is the vaccine. It is in their interest to promote vaccines. I think they should also warn us of the risks. Unfortunately, the CDC has taken down its entire set of links that discuss the existence of simian cancer virus that contaminated the polio vaccine in the 1960s. There are google links but those links are dead. Too much real scientific fuel for the “Vaccine deniers”. However, the NIH has not gotten around to taking down their links about this (yet). I get the concern about not getting the whole herd vaccinated. I am NOT paranoid about vaccines, I AM and all my children are vaccinated. However, there is good SCIENTIFIC reason to worry about what is in these big Parma concoctions. From NIH “These data suggest that there may be an increased incidence of certain cancers among the 98 million persons exposed to contaminated polio vaccine in the U.S.; further investigations are clearly justified.” Of course, most BoingBoing readers (I’m guessing) are too young to have to worry about this particular accident since the contamination was discovered in 1960. They still did not recall the contaminated vaccine and still proceeded to inject the cancer virus in me and my friends for three more years. That should be cause for your concern. And in case you have not noticed, people my age (64) are dying of cancer at an alarming rate. No paranoia here, just facts. Luck Strike cigarette commercials in those days stated “Most Doctors Smoke Lucky Strikes”!!! My grandmother’s doctor told her to start smoking cigarettes to lose weight in 1945. Be careful about what and who you believe.

2 Likes

I would suggest that the “interesting conclusions” that people drew before the advent of the scientific method may be more “interesting” than reliable.

1 Like

I remember a doctor telling a young me that all doctors were scientists. Unfortunately too many doctors are at best people mechanics with a long tech-school education. But by wearing the scientist halo they can appeal to their own authority even when they only heard about the topic from a drug rep or Readers Digest.

4 Likes

History is full of huge foul-ups and big organizations usually prefer the cover-up approach to the admit-wrongdoing-and-try-to-fix-it approach.

But what do we do with that information? Do I stop buying fresh vegetables because they are sometimes contaminated with E. Coli? Every time I walk into a doctor’s office to get a shot I know it could be harmful or ever fatal - in addition to contamination, the bottle could simply be mislabeled, the doctor could make a dosing error, the building could collapse, the list goes on forever. Why would contamination of vaccines be the thing I decide to hang my hat on when serious vaccine complications are less common that pedestrian-vehicle fatalities? If I keep only the top ten things likely to kill me this minute in mind at any given time, am I being naive?

3 Likes

That sounds, then, like we need to be less critical tomorrow, about the research around vaccination, than we are today. And I do not think that was at all his point.

And in case you have not noticed, people my age (64) are dying of cancer at an alarming rate.

Age-adjusted cancer deaths in our age cohort (and I’m your age) are actually down. It’s just that more of us are living this long, and we have to die of something. $HERSELF was actually in the Stage 1 trial of the killed-virus vaccine, but I (and probably you) got the oral one.

As it happens, there’s lots of data on the cancer rates for those who got various generations of the polio vaccines, both in the USA and elsewhere. Nothing showing up – SV40 doesn’t seem to do much to us, which is not exactly surprising.

2 Likes

Thanks much. I will!

Medical research is starting to understand the origins of autoimmune disorders, and there seems to be a two-fold path: first, a genetic predisposition, and second, a childhood virus or other illness that may have been mild at the time but it starts the immune system down a bad path. This is why the tendency for autoimmune disorders runs in a family but each sufferer may have a different manifestation.

Developing an autoimmune disorder at some point after getting a vaccination could just as easily have come from a minor bug that didn’t even necessitate keeping the child home from school at the time.

2 Likes

TLDR: while drug companies might not be immune from every potential lawsuit related to vaccines, they are immune from lawsuits for injuries related to design defect. And my understanding is that eveyrone has to go through the NVICP process, regardless of alleged cause, before they can take anything to civil court, and effectively the NVICP is the only recourse.

I’m not saying it’s a terrible idea - it actually makes some sense. But it also introduces some negative consequences that we see when anyone is immune from liability for their actions.

3 Likes

Yes, vaccines have side effects. Some can kill you, like the smallpox vaccine (1-2 per million death rate). So can almost anything else in existence. That’s why we stopped giving peolpe the vaccine once the disease was eradicated. Anyone who gives you statements about risk of some action without the context of the risk of not taking that action should be corrected, ignored, or (if trying to sway others less knowledgable) made to STFU.

Also, the U.S. mostly didn’t allow personal belief exemptions for vaccination requirments until fairly recently, at least not easily. Some states still don’t, and some (I think it’s 2?) don’t even allow religious exemptions.

2 Likes

All of the science of vaccine denial is contained in the phrase “the tragedy of the commons”.

There is a non-zero chance that vaccination will hurt your child. But vaccination only works if nearly everyone is vaccinated. Therefore, the optimal situation is for your own child to be the only one who is not vaccinated. No risk, all gain. It’s quite scientific.

My take on the vaccination crusade is that y’all are ranting about a broken window while your house is burning down.

3 Likes

This statement is as true for the time after the advent of the scientific method as the time before. Science and especially medical science is littered with disproven truths. Some interesting, some less so. One long accepted such truth currently coming under scrutiny is the use of adrenaline in cardiac arrests Epinephrine for cardiac arrest - PubMed.

The benefit of the scientific method and Evidence Based Medicine (which is what we are talking about here) is, that we know some, very few things for certain e.g. TB is caused by bacteria. But the real truth is that there are far far more things that we know nothing about and that is unlikely to change significantly in the future.

The more we discover the more we discover what we don’t yet know. Recent advances in genetics are a good example, they seem to call into question much of accepted wisdom not unlike Galileo’s questioning of the order of the planets http://www.evolutionnewsorg/2013/07/more_clues_that_1074451.html

The trouble is that for most of lives’ decisions including most of lives’ medical decisions there is no evidence base but we still have to make the call.

On that note coming back to the vaccination question. With my first daughter we had a slightly alternative GP who explained to us the risks of vaccination as well as the importance of herd immunity. Safe to say we vaccinated our daughter and the argument for herd immunity weighed significantly in that decision.

I have also spent three weeks at home with same daughter when she had shingles, not because she was not well enough to leave the house, but because I didn’t want to put anyone immune suppressed or pregnant in danger. I also take infection risks very seriously and am very conscious that there are many immune suppressed people among us for whom minor infections can spell disaster and that my need to carry on regardless shouldn’t weigh above their need not to be exposed to unnecessary risks.

Rather than vilifying everyone who ever questions anything remotely related to vaccination I wish more energy is spent on explaining concepts such as herd immunity and the impact of minor infection risk on immune suppressed people.

1 Like

No, just means we should be able to ask questions of research today and tomorrow.

The first amendment means that little to you?

1 Like