People WERE dying from these childhood diseases that you pooh-pooh and say are trivial. They’re not now, thanks to vaccines. Shut the fuck up and let the real adults do the work of eradicating these diseases, or at least making it so fewer kids die of preventable diseases.
The vaccine-autism “link” is still a fraud. It’s not just a study that turned out to be wrong, it is an out and out fraud. Andrew Wakefield, the man who wrote that paper was disciplined for serious professional misconduct, and was found to have acted “dishonestly and irresponsibly”. He manipulated his data to get those results. He did it because he had applied for a patent on a rival vaccine that would have been an alternative to the standard MMR vaccine. He did it to make money, just like you accuse teh eeeeevul pharmaceutical companies of supporting vaccines to do.
There a few who, you know, wouldn’t CALL themselves “antivaxer”, but who still skipped the shots, or would consider it, based on the media scare and bullshit info.
Will not cite. Do your own legwork (not trying to be an ass. I’m just busy. )
I’m not an anti-vaxer but chickenpox wasn’t exactly a heartless killer before vaccinations began.
In a population of hundreds of millions there might be 91 deaths per year due to (extremely uncommon) adverse reactions to vaccines. Or in car accidents on the way to the vaccinations, or of old age sitting in the waiting room.
I think saving 91 lives a year is a great thing, but I’m not sure this is much of a trump card in the anti-vaxer fight.
Well, a few of them like to argue that vaccines don’t work anyway, that they’re bad for the immune system, that all drops in deaths are due to better nutrition and sanitation, etc. So you could shove it up the snouts of those sorts.
No, it wasn’t, but it did kill some people. It also permanently scarred others, such as myself. I won’t say the scars caused my body image issues, but having scars on my face certainly didn’t help matters. I wish there had been a chickenpox vaccine when I was a kid, and if and when I have a kid, I will certainly get him or her vaccinated for chickenpox on schedule.
Chickenpox,measles and the mumps were all pretty routine when I was growing up. No one panicked. No small pox or polio, although I had seen a number of people a few years older than me with small pox scars and people with shrivelled limbs due to polio.
Do you mean routine in that everybody got them, or routine in that you don’t remember anyone dying or having any serious complications from them?
If it’s the first, I’m not sure how that’s relevant. If it’s the second, that’s the kind of sloppy thinking that anti-vaxxers use (not saying you’re one). “I had chicken pox/measles/mumps/the flu, and it wasn’t so bad, so vaccines aren’t necessary!” ignores the real numbers of not just deaths, but life-long disabilities that are and were associated with the diseases.
It’s the same logic as “helmets for bike-riding children aren’t necessary, because my friends and I all lived through bike crashes!,” ignoring that fact some children DIDN’T, and some children DID but had serious injuries that caused lifelong problems.
We all got chickenpox when I was a kid, and now we all have the threat of shingles to look forward to.
I think maybe one of the points here is that we consider chickenpox to be one of the more innocuous childhood diseases, and it was still killing 105 kids per year (and causing I don’t know how many cases of shingles).
I am getting the shingles vaccine as soon as I possibly can. The prospect of agonizing pain, potentially lasting months or years after the shingles outbreak, scares the crap out of me. Not to mention the damage it can do to the eye if you’re unfortunate enough to have it there!
Exactly. Deaths of children were also more routine in those days than they are now, because of those diseases. Go look at an old cemetery some time.
I remember riding in cars without a seatbelt. It was fun. I want to say, “seat belts and car seats aren’t necessary, because we all did fine without them,” but, in fact, my childhood best friend broke her elbow riding unrestrained in the back of her parents’ van. My best friend in middle school (not the same person) got a concussion riding her bike without a helmet. Kids did get injured riding in cars without seatbelts and riding bikes without helmets (or maybe it was just dangerous to be my friend, though I wasn’t there when either of those things happened).
People died even from a disease as innocuous as chickenpox.
But that’s not because of the vaccine - it’s due to better sanitation!!
Sorry, just channeling the stupid there.
Other predictable responses from antivaxers including mocking the marked drop in varicella-related mortality by saying the numbers of deaths were relatively low from the disease pre-vaccination (these are the same people who trumpet the rare deaths attributed to vaccine reactions).
Beyond reducing deaths from chickenpox, the vaccine has lowered serious complications and had an impact on suffering and economic costs associated with the disease:
“The most common complications from varicella are bacterial infections of the skin and soft tissues in children and pneumonia in adults. Infections may be severe and include septicemia, toxic shock syndrome, necrotizing fasciitis, osteomyelitis, bacterial pneumonia, and septic arthritis. Other complications caused by VZV include cerebellar ataxia, encephalitis, viral pneumonia, and bleeding problems.”
Bah, what’s a little toxic shock, necrotizing fasciitis and septic arthritis? Part of the natural order of things, I say. :dubious:
“Why vaccinate children for what is usually a benign disease? Why not allow children to acquire natural infection and offer vaccine only to susceptible adolescents and adults?
Routine varicella vaccination for children is recommended for many reasons. More than 90% of cases, approximately 60% of hospitalizations, and 40% of deaths due to varicella occur in children less than 10 years of age. The majority of this morbidity and mortality is preventable by vaccination. In addition, children miss an average of 5-6 days of school when they have varicella and parents or other caregivers miss 3-4 days of work to care for sick children. The majority of adults who acquire varicella, as well as persons at high risk for severe disease who are not eligible for vaccination, contract the disease from unvaccinated children. From a societal perspective, a routine two-dose vaccination policy for children is cost-saving compared with no vaccination…Most importantly, it is not possible to predict who will have a mild case of chickenpox and who will have a serious or even deadly case of disease. The vaccine is safe and effective, and should be used to prevent as many cases as possible.”
My previous bout with shingles was the primary reason why I made damn sure the sprog got the chickenpox vaccine. It may be inconvenient if he gets the disease, but shingles is painful as hell and not an experience I’d care to repeat.
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