There are too many of them.
I do like the general direction of your thinking, but the thing is if we segregate them to unvaccinated ghetto’s then they will never be challenged or shamed by those around them. I want them to live in the general public, but have to send their children to special private schools and to have to wear the facemask and biohazard symbol when in public. This will ensure they are actually publicly shamed every time they go outside, which is what I want.
And yeah the H L Mencken quote is good but I gotta say after reading about him that he was a bit of a racist cunt.
The good thing about the outbreak in Disneyland is that in California you can only use medical reasons to not get your kid vaccinated. Court challenges by the morons have gotten nowhere.
My wife is working on a book on Vaccines, which will have a chapter on the controversy - which will give lots of facts to use. I’ll post a link when it gets published - she gets royalties. 
No argument from me. Other than the pedantic need to point out that the actual infection would be with Clostridium tetani, the bacterium that produces the toxin that causes tetanus.
I wish my maternal great-grandmother could meet some of these anti-vaxxers and slap the shit out of them. She bore six children, and if she’d done it when there were vaccines it’s likely all six would have lived much longer lives.
Instead, one died the day after birth. She’d had measles while pregnant and while the baby appeared healthy when born, he upped and died the next day. Luckily his twin, while a tiny, sickly looking thing, grew up healthy to be my great-uncle George. Another brother died of diptheria when he was three, and a third son died at eighteen of the flu. A sister died in her thirties of something preventable, I can’t remember for sure. So only George, and my maternal grandmother Esther lived long enough to see grandchildren.
Would Wakefield have been caught if the anti-vaxxers had not been so vociferous?
Similiar to my great-grandmother. One of her sons died when he was three of whooping cough, another of tetanus when he was seven after stepping on a rusty nail. Disgusting, isn’t it?
I hate it when that happens.
But I don’t.
BTW, I know I mention this in every anti-vax thread. But this is just one of the things that pisses me off so bad – my great-grandmother didn’t have the option to have her kids vaccinated. Can you imagine how she would’ve reacted to these motherfuckers? Go to a cemetary some time and look at some of the older graves. Probably a good number of them are children. Nowadays, we think of a high child mortality rate as something that happens in other countries – “oh, now we have better medicine and sanitation, that’s only in poor countries!” But it used to be that way right here, in our own country as well. And you know why it stopped? VACCINES!!!
(My grandmother was probably only five years old when her brother died from tetanus. I’m not sure about her other brother)
I once saw a little girl with her mom in a cemetery. The litttle girl pointed to a grave. “Mommy, look. That grave is wrong. You said they tell when the person was born and when they died, but that says 1900-1905, so that can’t be right.”
Her mother bent down and whispered to her. Little girl: “WHAT?!” :eek:
I have an aunt I never met because she died when she was three. She had either the mumps or Hib, both now vaccine preventable.
My mother lived, but she suffered through both measles and mumps. She also had a second trimester miscarriage after having the flu when she was pregnant, back when pregnant women weren’t given flu shots (neither were children).
I used to think that vaccines could, very rarely, in vulnerable people, cause a form of regressive retardation with seizures, because I have worked with people who carried a “vaccine-injured” diagnosis (from the DTP shot-- in fact, it’s the reason it was changed to DTaP), and one even got an award from the vaccine injury fund. But I learned later that a gene was located for something called Dravet syndrome around 2000, and close to 100% of people with a vaccine-injured diagnosis who were tested for Dravet syndrome were positive for it. Now, it’s true that febrile seizures from a vaccine may have actually triggered the first seizure in many Dravet patients, but because these people had Dravet, something would have triggered that first seizure. I do not know for sure, but I strongly suspect now that the people I worked with had Dravet syndrome.
Anyway, even when I thought the DTP shot presented a slim chance of a serious problem, I was never an anti-vaxxer, because cripes, D or P or T all alone could do way more damage than the potential damage of the vaccine. Some people are very bad at risk assessment. Heck, even the parents of one of the people I worked with still vaccinated their other child, they just took special precautions. His DTP shot was delayed a few months, and he got a dose of Tylenol 1 hr. before, and then was kept at the doctor’s office for an hour afterwards. Probably all totally unnecessary, but care done with the best knowledge at the time.
I’ll be attacked, but that’s OK. I believe in getting all the needed vaccines, but I don’t believe its healthy to get them all in a brief period of time. I think they should be spaces out more. I hear the reason they don’t do this is not because they are trying to protect the child as quickly as possible, but they think parents are more likely to get them all if its only a few trips to the doctor. Don’t think the human immune system evolved to produce 5 different antibodies in 1 day.
Vicsage: What you’re suggesting isn’t screamingly irrational. It may be correct. It’s something that can be tested scientifically.
At present, is there any useful evidence that getting a bunch of immunizations in one day is counter-productive? Are you only speculating, or has this been studied?
You are entirely correct, I should have said Tetanus instead of Cholera: Tetanus is a big killer in developing countries and easily vaccinated against. The cholera vaccine has been available for many decades (maybe just not approved in the US). I had it about 20 years ago when I was travelling for an extended period in remote areas of Indonesia, Thailand and Cambodia. It only lasts six months so yes it’s usually only given to people where an outbreak happens or to travellers who ask for it.
Vicsage I don’t anyone will attack you for saying that, its a reasonable question to ask if combined vaccinations are the best way. But it’s not some devious plot by big pharma, rather a matter of best use of limited resources. Combined vaccines save money and take less health resources to deliver. Cheaper vaccines are a good thing, since it means more people in developing countries ( and poorer people in rich countries) can afford them. Coming back for each individual shot will cost you more money, because you’re taking more of a nurses time delivering them all individually and paying more to buy separate doses. Unless there is good evidence that combined vaccines are dangerous in some way it would be foolish to legislate that they all be given separately, and it would directly lead to more people dying in developing countries since the costs would go up of delivering them.
But if you want to space out vaccines for your own child and pay the extra, go right ahead.
Being called “not screamingly irrational” is one of the nicest things I’ve been called. Just speculation, although I had a dog once get some sort of auto-immune disease shortly after being given a large # of vaccines. Dog recovered, but the Vet suggested spacing them the next time and not giving him ones that were he was unlikely to need. Until you know for sure a little caution with no risk isn’t always a bad idea.
Doctor’s / Immunologists who work out suggested vaccine courses for large scale health programs have to make risk / reward choices, and they don’t have unlimited resources and no vaccine is 100 percent reliable or 100 percent guaranteed to be free of side effects. Made up example: If the combined doses cause a 1 in 10,000 increase of cases of an auto immune disorder but cost 3 times less, they are justified in recommending the combined doses. Far more harm would be done by recommending the individual doses since less people would be covered with the same budget.
I understand the economics and the numbers, but as you said earlier, I’m willing to spend the extra money and time to be cautious. And I have been severely criticized in the past for mot toeing the timeline that they want you to do. And I don’t know if there are any studies about safety issues of cramming lots of vaccines in a short period of time, but if there aren’t, there should be.
The “I’m not anti-vax, I just think it’s too much at one time” thing is a position that started to come out after it started to become clear - post-Wakefield takedown - that the basic anti-vax position was BS. These things are like fashions. A few years ago it was “MMR causes autism”. Now its “I’m not against vaccines as such but…”
There’s no more evidence for the sub-trends that have split off from the “MMR causes autism” trend than for the “MMR causes autism” trend itself. It’s just that the people who were fully anti-vax are beating a face saving retreat. If it’s not “they are too much at once” it’s “they are administered too young” or some other thing.
There are many many papers about combined vaccines. According to this in order to be approved for usage “New combinations cannot be less immunogenic, less efficacious, or more reactogenic than the previously licensed uncombined vaccines.” So yes they study the safety in depth before combination vaccines are approved.