Or, I’ve got an anti-vaxer on my facebook :smack:
Is there a good site out there that shows the number of deaths/disabilities before and after vaccines were introduced?
I know that rubella can cause blindness in a child if the mother contracts it during pregnancy, would there be stats for that? What about measles, mumps, tetanus, smallpox? Cervical cancer?
And I might as well add in Polio
Here’s a link to an article (with a nice graph) that is reporting on a study that shows a >90% drop in many of the diseases that are preventable by childhood vaccines.
In my experience with anti-vaxxers, little things like facts and data don’t do much. Still, I always try to refute their arguments since even if they are lost causes, someone else reading the debate may be swayed by overwhelming scientific evidence.
Meant to add that the key figure in that JAMA study is Table 1 for older vaccines and Table 2 for more modern ones.
You shouldn’t need to do much beyond posting those two tables.
The German wikipedia article on Polio mentions the clear observable effect due to the two-year delay in introducing the vaccine: the vaccine was first developed in Russia, and thus introduced in the GDR, but for (idiotic) reasons a Russian-based vaccine was not acceptable in the West, so they waited two years until Salk developed his (ideologically acceptable) version which was then used in West Germany.
The curves of affected children tracked in both countries show the obvious dip in relation to the introduction of the vaccine, and since only the different introduction time was the difference (healthcare standards were pretty good on both sides of the Wall, as was genetics and food), this is the only reasonable explanation for the observable effect.
(What I personally find so interesting about the polio article is how harmless from a biological standpoint it is: only 1% of all infected get the serious form that results in damaged legs or needing an iron lung or death; but still there were several thousands of serious cases each year, and people from the generation before the vaccine all remember knowing somebody in the neighborhood, school or family who was affected.
To compare this to diseases with a much higher percentage of serious consequences and transmission rate is frightening.
Talking to an anti-vax nutter is like trying to explain loop quantum gravity to a capuchin monkey. You might want to contact or check out the web page of the NVICP. My wife used to work for a woman whose daughter had a real, documented, and compensated-for vaccination injury. There are about forty such injuries every year in the United States. Contrast that with the hundreds of millions of premature deaths that have been prevented with vaccinations, and you can see that winning this argument is a slam-dunk no-brainer. Unless the person you’re explaining it to has no brain, in which case you’re probably going to find a more receptive audience in the capuchin monkey.
Right here in my little suburban community, we had an outbreak of whooping cough this spring, with something like a dozen children infected. I know one of the mothers, who naturally didn’t believe in vaccinations. After staying home for a month to take care of her son, she didn’t want to show her face around the parents of the kids who had been exposed to him.
There are currently outbreaks of measles in various areas of the country. The CDC website has a good summary of the statistics from that, including the fact that approximately 90% of the people with measles were unvaccinated. Measles, of course, is highly contagious (I’ve read somewhere that’s it’s one of the most contagious diseases, but I can’t track that info down), and can lead to pneumonia, chronic otitis media, encephalitis (including a type that’s very difficult to survive), and corneal ulcerations and scarring. Mortality rates are about 1 in 1000 for developed countries.
Like others have said, anti-vaxxers are not interested in facts. They won’t listen to scientific arguments, and will dismiss all statistics out of hand unless those statistics back their beliefs that vaccines are TEH EVIL. Don’t get your hopes up.
Penn & Teller explain it well, I thought.
It’s worth noting that the fact that 90% of the infected were unvaccinated occurred in spite of the fact that in the general population about 90% of people are vaccinated - strong evidence that the vaccine is very effective.
What concerns me is that I’ve read of pockets of the country in which vaccine rates are much lower than 90%. The herd immunity threshold for measles is about 95% (depending on who you talk to), so even 90% isn’t that great.
I agree completely.
I made up a list of short descriptions of common childhood diseases for a thread a while ago - you can cut and paste it and send it to your Facebooker if you like. I think part of the problem with the anti-vaccination movement is that vaccinations have been too successful - young mothers have never seen the diseases we vaccinate for, and have gotten complacent.
Cat Whisperer, I use your list in my lecture on vaccines and autism (and give full credit to “some person I know on a message board” 
).
You might want to mention to (I’m going to go out on a limb here and say ‘her’) that cancer vaccines are cutting-edge technology right now. Not just cervical cancer, but potentially all solid neoplasms.
This is freakin’ awesome. I’m taking a Summer class right now on child health and safety. Of course, I have to do the ubiquitous ‘Hot Topic’ class presentation. Nothing fancy—one page, single-spaced with proper APA cites, sprinkled with a few pretty Powerpoint graphics. I’ve just decided what the subject matter will be. God, sometimes I don’t know what I’d do without the Dope.
Here is a graph of Polio being eradicated in the GDR.
The text says: “GDR free from Polio”, the upper curve is “Diseases” (caught), the lower curve “Deaths”, the caption at the bottom says “1st half of year 1961: 42 deaths in West Germany”. The one death for 1961 in the GDR was a non-vaccinated child.
