To vaccinate or not to vaccinate: Should it even be a question?

boing
44

In an ideal world, maybe. In a world of private healthcare and NHS cutbacks it doesn’t work like that.

I used to get bad migraines, which made me vomit and unable to walk. Are you suggesting that if I couldn’t get a doctor to come and visit me (there was no way I was going to the surgery because I would be in even worse pain and dry retching the whole time) I should have gone into hospital? It would have been pointless for me to go there for a few days as I would have taken up a hospital bed while I didn’t recover any faster than I would have done at home.

I do want things to become more like the ideal that you suggest, but we are a long way from there at the moment

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45

Yeah, but… you’re an adult, so you can decide to avoid coffee. My son is 5, so avoiding peanuts and nuts (which are in the most remarkable places that you would never suspect) is a lot harder. I’m never going to be one of those parents who tries to insist that peanuts and nuts be banned from his school system, but it’s hard not to look like one when you’re hovering over his treats bag the teachers had set up in the classroom for Valentine’s day taking out half of the stuff other kids had given him which you know or suspect contained nuts.

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46

They make a wide range of drugs to significantly reduce the symptoms and/or reduce their frequency of a migraines such as sumatriptan, ergotamine, metoclopramide, topiramate, valproate semisodium, etc. So yes, you should have gone to the doctor.

I can’t imagine why they’d have you stay there over night instead of giving you one of the drugs so you could at least walk around without throwing up.

47

Unfortunately (even if it wasn’t fundamentally a bad idea) allowing the US to do this would turn the US into a breeding ground for epidemics. Diseases would have free reign to spread and mutate. Large portions of the population would be at high risk of carrying a deadly disease. And unlike 3rd world countries, people in the US get free reign and travel all over the world regularly. The result would be a global increase in fatalities from preventable diseases.

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48

The comparison is appropriate in some cases — I’ve run into a couple of parents who are trying to ban nuts from our local school system whom I suspect probably are anti-vaxxers (and they’re idiots) — but it’s hard being emotional driven all the time about something that is more difficult to manage than you might expect (given the ubiquity of nuts of food products). That being said, I don’t think there really was any insinuation on your part.

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49

The cartoon is actually the opposite of what I’ve encountered several times in schools and church.

“We’ve asked you several times to stop sending peanut butter sandwiches in with your child, Mrs. Vaxravity, and you keep doing it. There are children here who will go into anaphylaxis, and have to be stabbed with an epi-pen by the teacher, if a child who has touched peanut butter touches them.”

“Oh, no, that’s all nonsense. People aren’t really allergic to nuts, they’ve just convinced themselves that they are and it’s all psychosomatic. When I was a kid everyone had peanut butter sandwiches all the time and it’s not a real problem. Those people are crybabies, nut allergies are not a real thing.”

“Mrs Vaxravity, if you touch Kelly or Matt after touching peanuts or tree nuts it leaves a red mark on their skin, and they start swelling up immediately. It’s not psychosomatic.”

“Oh, I can’t believe that. They just smell it on you and their parents have taught them to fear it. Let’s talk about that little unvaccinated kid, I want that kid banned forever from everything!”

Seriously. I’m not making this up. We have large signs posted, but I still periodically have to physically restrain adults from taking food into the “no food” areas because “Oh, it’s just a slice of cheesecake. Milk allergies aren’t real.”

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50

I understand you have numerous issues interacting with the world, but don’t you think it’s just a little selfish and presumptious to
a) self-diagnose yourself with vaccina, and
b) keep that information to yourself and away from the public health authorities?

At the time you felt you were too sick to go to the doctor: okay, fine. But are you still too sick to make anyone officially aware of it?

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51

The real casualty in the war between pro- and anti- vaccinators is critical thought. If there is something about the standard treatment of pregnant women and newborns that is causing some sort of lasting health issue it sure as hell isn’t going to be found while these two groups scream at each other and call each other names.

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52

I didn’t say how old I was when I got the allergy.

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54

No, you didn’t. If you got it at an early age that must have been very difficult for your parents. Just as now it can’t be easy for you either. Food allergies are not a joke, ever (and they weren’t a joke for me even before finding out that my son is allergic to nuts).

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55

Even though I agree with you, you’re kind of turning into one if those boorish parents at this point.

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56

JLW, As a new parent I got thrown into this issue and there are a few things that do cause me pause regarding the current forced vaccination topic. At first I didnt think much of the debate and figured my child would undergo the recommended vaccination schedule but to check my decision I have been reviewing data from CDC VAERS and the Vaccine Injury Court as well as researching studies delivered through the NIH/CDC. Finally I have been comparing our vaccination schedule against Denmark, UK and Japan.

Here is what I am seeing so far:

  1. Some of the mandatory vaccines are not mandatory in most other countries and their reasons for being mandatory here dont seem to make much sense. Take HepB. A mother is tested for HebB during pregnancy, HepB is transmitted through the mother or through blood to blood contact (health worker, drug addict, sex). They are not sure but they think that the lifetime of the vaccine is only applicable for two years. So why does every child receive it at birth? UK, Denmark and Japan are at will or if the child or parent is at risk.

  2. Looking at VAERS data and the Vaccine Injury court there is a noticeable impact of some of these vaccines which include death, permanent injury etc. My problem with the data is that it is totally at will and incomplete. Some of the people in these databases could have been injured by other things and people or only added to the database if their case was submitted. It would be really nice to have something a bit more conclusive.

  3. There has been some problems found with the FDA accepting fraudulent research (including a recent article on Slate two days ago), drug companies have also submitted fraudulent data (MERCK MMR / NIH study regarding conflicts of interest / etc), and there have been injuries as well as previous vaccines pulled from the market.

Anyways, just thought I would add my piece.

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57

At first, I thought my allergies were just doing something different. And then, things got very scary. And then, I was recovering and I was able to figure out what was going on.

At the time, the doctor’s office was about eight miles away, too far to walk when sick.

I had learned to never ever ever call an ambulance or go to a hospital, so I didn’t.

I did try to tell doctors afterwards, when going over my medical history, but they ignored it since it was rare and since I didn’t have a proper diagnosis for it.

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58

This is a common conservative argument when it comes to so-called controversial topics like vaccination or climate change (things that are not actually controversial, or at least shouldn’t be).

In the case of climate change, because it’s something I’m more familiar with and is easier for me to illustrate, there are people out there dedicated to “auditing” climate data - one example that comes to mind is a website where people investigate this system of temperature recording stations set up around the US which theoretically are uniform in design and construction and maintenance and so on, and set up in a uniform way so as to be accurate and reliable.

As you can imagine, with such a huge system, there will be variables at play. If you look at each individual station, you can probably find problems with each one. These people pick apart things like if the correct type of paint was used for the enclosing box, if it’s located too close to a heat island (parking lots, for example), and if the built environment has changed significantly since it was installed which would indeed have a noticeable effect on the data.

And you know… these are good questions to ask! This is why this type of argument is so persistent. The problem is, the answer to those questions is “it doesn’t matter” in a scientific context. This is hard to compute for most people who aren’t trained scientists. How can it not matter that the temperature recording stations are not 100% consistent? Several reasons. Even when the data is reported with full detail, this type of variance is considered and is included within the margin of error - and the interpreted results far exceed the margin of error.

Is there a possibility of legitimate problems beyond that - yes. Are fundamental, critical problems common, or reasonable to think exist in large projects like this - or that there’s collusion among the many different such projects that all corroborate the data - no. So here’s the real problem. What motivation do these people have? They are not thinking scientifically - it’s not peer review - they are politically (or religiously or whatever the case may be) motivated to find fault in the system, so they keep arguing that these things that don’t matter do, refusing to accept that they don’t.

So with your examples - they all sound bad. Does any of it matter in a scientific context, much less the public health context? Not really. They’re the equivalent of checking that the exact type of paint is used.

Interestingly in the vaccine context, arguments like this are essentially scaremongering against vaccines. In the climate context, the arguments are used to suggest that climate change “believers” are the ones scaremongering. But in both cases, it’s fearmongering by picking out things that are actually bad but which more importantly sound really bad, but that don’t matter.

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59

I don’t know about @the_borderer, but for me, none of those drugs work in safe doses. My migraines are what neurologists have described as “intractable”. There appears to be no medically significant damage done by them, but I have no way of preventing them after years of trying out many different drugs.

It may be the same for @the_borderer.

The only cure I’ve ever found for my migraines is immediately shutting myself up in a cold, dark, quiet place, with guns and power tools safely locked away so I’m not tempted to end the pain permanently.

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60

The logic is simple, much like the people. “I didn’t punch my child in the face, a stranger did. Therefore, the injuries to my child aren’t my fault. I’m not ACTIVELY to blame. I didn’t actually DO anything to my child, I merely failed to do something. Failure to act isn’t my fault.”

Yes, this is a belief among a lot of people. Standing passively by and letting someone dies means, to them, that they aren’t at fault for the person’s death. “I’m not my brother’s keeper.”

Eh. What can you do…

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61

I think they meant “I was too sick to get out of bed/lift an arm to the phone” sick.

That DID happen to me once. My back went into spasms so powerful, I literally lay on the ground for hours, unable to reach either of my phones, and I went untreated for most of a day.

(Yes, I live alone, in an area that values its privacy, where a concerned neighbor or a “health and welfare check” by local officials would be seen as a HORRENDOUS invasion of personal privacy. We’re talking “Git Offa Mah Lawn!” with shotguns…)

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62

I live in a similar place and L5S1 has left me in a similar position. I worry about it but its a cost of choosing to live where I do.

63

In the US, there are no mandatory vaccines. We have vaccination schedules which are recommended by the CDC. That is all.

The Hepatitis B vaccine - developed over 30 years ago - is believed to provide indefinite protection. What it does not do however is provide detectable Hepatitis B antibodies for more than a few years. Happily though, your B-cells will produce them rapidly in response to the virus if you’ve had the vaccine providing you with indefinite protection.

There has been zero cases of someone who had the hepatitis B vaccine with a normal immune system developing hepatitis B after over 20 years.

Every child does not, but most do because people believe vaccines prevent or significantly reduce the chance of becoming seriously ill, developing some awful lifelong malady or dying from an infectious disease we can prevent. Because you know, they do

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