Your cites prove nothing.
In case you didn’t have a chance to read some of the linked studies part of the problem is that non-vaccination isn’t without serious costs, consequences and risks. There’s a ranging whooping cough epidemic in California right now. Whooping cough has a one in one hundred chance of killing a baby. On sixteen different levels encouraging any parent to avoid vaccination is putting a baby an unacceptable risk.
[QUOTE=TimeWinder;12840307
I wouldn’t use Wikipedia as my primary source for science information, either.
Or maybe they have learned from the numerous studies that showed that it does not increase autism, but does dramatically improve vaccine safety (in it’s role as preservative).[/QUOTE]
I’m not sure if you got my point, but do you share my concern about using only few different vaccines worldwide? This company delivered 500 Million doses of the same product (no names mentioned). Ten bucks a shot in this particular case. Were they hasty or not? Objective information - where?
Earl Snake-HipsTucker, how about the SDMB’s own Bad Astronomer?
This. Why are we talking in theoreticals? Eight babies in California have been killed in California by pertussis this year.
If enought anti-vaccination nuts let their children grow up without vaccinations, there will be more. However, some of those kids won’t make it to adulthood because of the foolish decisions of their parents. Remember smallpox, anyone? Polio? Diphtheria? etc. Sheesh.
My wife and I are both recovering from whooping cough right now. I can absolutely believe its a killer. I’ve never experienced a cough like this before – deep, wracking and unrelenting. If I hadn’t started out with a healthy, strong respiratory system, I can easily imagine how I could have coughed myself to death.
My two kids, BTW, who are fully up on their vaxes, have been completely unaffected.
Raging not ranging.
:smack:
So sorry to hear about your family. That sucks.
There’s also another aspect to encouraging such a study. We’re writing about illnesses that don’t just harm the people who get them. Most vaccine preventable diseases are highly contagious. Certain people cannot be vaccinated because of underlying medical issues. Others have immune systems that simply will not become immune from some diseases no matter how many shots they get. Subjecting others to the risks of catching a bad disease just to prove something to know to be true is dangerous and stupid.
The unvaccinated are actually at greatest risk should a study like this get conducted. They’re far more likely to get the illnesses in question because they have neither natural immunity or immunity from vaccines.
It’s unethical on so many different levels.
There’ve been about 15-20 epidemiological studies comparing vaccinated to unvaccinated populations all finding no link. Quite frankly, the subject has seen far more research than it deserves. It’s conclusively debunked.
The science based medicine site on vaccines and autism is a good start.
Any idea where you got it?
None. As LavenderBlue says, there’s an epidemic in SoCal right now. I could have walked past the wrong person in the supermarket. Apparently you’re most infectious in the early stages before the distinctive cough appears.
The nasty thing about it is that the symptoms can linger for months. Within two days of the cough starting I was at the doctor getting antibiotics. That killed the infection, but the damage had been done. It’s been more than a month and I still sometimes have coughing fits that are strong enough to make me see spots.
I got Whooping Cough 3 or 4 winters ago, and it sucked like you wouldn’t believe. My Dr said I could have caught it anywhere, but he had seen it in high school teachers and people who had contact with late teens most often. Apparently that’s when the childhood vaccinations wear off for most folks.
I actually broke a rib from one of my coughing fits. It was not a good winter.
I created a new thread about whooping cough so as not to hijack this one.
There’s no evidence linking autism to vaccinations. It’s something else. Currently, I’m suspecting the influx of high fructose corn syrup in the 70’s.
If it’s not one conspiracy theory, it’s another.
In order to do a proper study you’d have to make a double blind study. You really can’t do it on the basis of “these guys didn’t get it.” Yeah you can do it that way, but you don’t get the “hard” scientific data.
What you’d do is have a set of children and a set of doctors. They would give a shot to every child. No one, not the kids, not the parents and not the doctors would know who got the shot and who got the placebo shot.
It’s similar to the problem with HIV. We don’t infect people with HIV. So to get good edcuated guesses we use people that were accidently infected.
For instance, people working with HIV and getting a needle prick. Then you go backwards after they were pricked and look to see at the infection rates.
Of course this method isn’t double blind so it will get slammed with “selection bias”
You don’t get the “real hard data” needed for strict scientific standard. But you get a good educated guess that can help.
But unless you use the double blind method, you’re gonna get someone critical of your study.
Even if you do use the double blind method you’ll never convince most anti-vax nuts anyway. Wakefield has been debunked left and right by every rational source. They’re still hailing him as a hero.
The anti-vaxxers talk a lot about how these diseases we vaccinate against really aren’t that bad, that the risks of dying aren’t that great, especially if they child’s immune systems are “strong,” whatever that means.
The thing I don’t get, though, is illustrated by The Hamster King’s post. Whooping Cough is REALLY bad. It’s exhausting and painful to cough like that. Even putting aside risk of death or long-term injury, I thank god that there are vaccines that prevent my kids from having to go through that. Why would I want to see them suffer that way if I can prevent it?
The linked HuffPo article from 2009* makes a number of false and misleading statements.
The Vaccine Safety Datalink (a collborative effort between the CDC and managed care organizations), far from being a supersecret database that no one else can see, is open to researchers and has been the source of numerous studies of vaccine safety. One of the elements in the database is VAERS data - reports of potential vaccine side effects that have not been studied to see whether they’re actually related to vaccines, or just occurred around the same time someone got vaccinated.
This raw VAERS data has been colossally misused by antivaccination forces (for example, in trying to tie deaths of teenagers to the HPV vaccine when actual proven causes of death have been from other medical problems). If the CDC is not letting lawyers paw through the Vaccine Safety Datalink material in order to get inspirations for lawsuits, it’s probably to prevent similar misuse of the data.
If researchers, including the “independent” ones cited on HuffPo want access to this information, they can get it.
The authors of the HuffPo article are RFK Jr. (known for a revoltingly biased and misleading article that kicked off a round of vaccine scaremongering in 2005) and David Kirby, an antivax “journalist” who obviously as of 2009 was still promoting the myth that the Amish don’t get autism because they’re unvaccinated. HuffPo has a horrific reputation for hosting antivax nonsense and a variety of alt med woo - any antivaccination article that appears there should be rigorously fact-checked using good sources like http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org, http://www.vaccineinformation.org and Vaccine Education Center | Children's Hospital of Philadelphia
As others have noted, it would be tremendously unethical to have a prospective study where you had a large number of kids left without vaccine protection, compared to a vaccinated group. The antivaxers know that will never fly, but they gripe about the lack of such a study while ignoring a lengthy record of epidemiologic investigation of vaccines that shows no increased risk of autism or myriad other maladies they have attempted to link to immunization.
*Antivax forces trumpeting supposed victory at the Vaccine Court (as noted in the linked article) have been most unhappy that since 2009 the Vaccine Court has issued multiple rulings against the existence of an autism-vaccine link.
Double blind studies are designed to remove the effect of placebos. You don’t need a double blind study to discover if actual stuff has happened. I once heard “there has never been a double blind study on the efficacy of parachutes” yet we’re reasonably confident that they work 
You can do an epidemiological study and simply look at the statistics in the aggregate. If vaccination lead to autism, there would be a lower rate of autism amongst the unvaccinated (adjusted for things like rate of detection, etc), and you can see that link without double blinding, and there is pretty clearly no such link.
My wife who works in special ed says yes there have been studies, and they were inconclusive.
That’s inaccurate. There are several large scale (Hundred thousands of people as a sample size) epidemilogical studies that were conducted in a proper and rigorous faction. The lack of a link has been pretty clearly demonstrated.