Massive measles outbreak - thank you, Andrew Fucking Wakefield

The BBQ Pit
561

Good question. I have not seen in any of these links a study that lasted longer than a few decades, or studied different generations simultaneously. I agree with you that there seems no reason to think that intergenerational differences would be significant.

Exactly what curlcoat means by “long-term study” is unclear, since AFAIK she’s never put a timeframe on her repeated references to “long term studies of the effects of vaccinations”. She seems to be just parrotting the antivax mantra “there are no long-term studies of vaccine safety”, which, as Kolga and LavenderBlue have pointed out, seems to mean basically “there are no studies determining exactly what possible side effects might exist for every vaccine at any point in the lifetime of any vaccinated person”.

562

I’m still confused at curlcoat’s use of “long-term effects”. Not that, at the end, it will make a big difference, but does she mean the possible effects (including chronic problems) that will occur shortly after completing a vaccination series (that acording to her, may be of long duration)? Or does she mean diseases that will show up years down the road?

563

I hear that within 60 years of being vaccinated, many people develop arthritis!

564

After about 100 years they’re all dead! :eek:

565

curlcoat is still bumping this thread!

:eek:

I have no idea why.

Is negative attention better than no attention at all?

I think it fair that if you’re going to ask about the long term effects of vaccines then should first ask about the long term effects of vaccine preventable diseases. The long term effects of many vaccine preventable diseases include the serious risk of major disability such as blindness, hearing loss, mental retardation and paralysis. In the worst case scenario you get horrific side effects like SSPE, in which measles shows up in a person’s brain a few years after infection and slowly kills them.

As I and many others have repeatedly pointed out (and the moronic curlcoat has deliberately chosen to ignore), vaccines have not been linked to autoimmune disorders.

For example vaccines do not cause diabetes:

Nor do they cause or worsen multiple sclerosis:

I would hope that **curlcoat **would read this and finally shut the fuck up but I doubt it.

566

Jumping in quite late, and haven’t read the whole thread, but I picked up that there is a vaccine for chicken pox? That can be administered as young as 12 months?

WHY THE HELL DID NO-ONE TELL ME THIS!!!11!!!1!!!

Both of mine have had chicken pox in the last five weeks or so and not at the same time - daughter caught it three weeks after son’s spots had dried up. I’d have paid any amount of money for my little ones to not have had to go through this (and my wife and I as well!)

Yeah, yeah, I know it’s non-lethal, no lasting effects, they both had mild cases (my daughter had maybe 10 spots; my son maybe 30 or 40), etc etc etc but it was a pretty miserable couple of months with two intermittently sick, grouchy kids and two grouchy sleep-deprived parents.

And the poo problems! EURGHHH!

567

There seem to be two main ways that questions about “long term effects of vaccines” can be intended or interpreted:

1) Has it been conclusively shown that all vaccines are absolutely harmless and will never cause or contribute to significant health problems at any point in any vaccinated person’s life?

2) Are any medical studies being done on possible statistically significant connections between vaccines and particular health problems over the long term, meaning several years or decades after the vaccination?

The answer to (1) is “No” and will always continue to be “No”, because you simply can’t prove that any medical treatment is 100% safe for everybody forever. However, many antivaxers seem to think that the lack of a “Yes” answer to (1) is sufficient justification for distrusting vaccines, or at least provides the excuse they’re looking for to regard vaccines with suspicion.

The answer to (2) is “Yes” and will always continue to be “Yes”, since of course medical researchers who study such health problems want to know all about their causes and contributing factors. Many examples of such studies have already been provided in this thread, as everybody but curlcoat is well aware.

Now, AFAICT there is no systematic comprehensive program of studies designed to explore all possible lifelong health impacts of vaccines within a given timeframe, because such long-term studies aren’t required in order for vaccines to be approved.

Which makes sense: antigens are most likely to produce side-effects in the short term, after all. It would be silly to delay acceptance of a vaccine that has been shown to be effective in preventing a dangerous illness, and to have no serious side-effects in the short term, just because we’re not yet absolutely sure that it can’t possibly have any longer-term negative effects.

Again, as Kolga and LavenderBlue point out, such a systematic comprehensive program of studies of all possible vaccine side-effects seems to be what antivaxers are demanding. When they say “there are no long-term studies” of vaccine effects, this is what they mean.

And the more that curlcoat goes on repeating the same previously answered question about long-term studies, the clearer it becomes that she’s ignoring the “Yes” answer to question (2). What she’s trying to do instead is demand a “Yes” answer to question (1), and pretend that its impossibility somehow counts as a “gotcha” against vaccine proponents.

568

Sounds like what curlcoat wants is some meta-study fishing expedition where people go looking for problems and find them even if they are not there. Wasn’t there a study of the HPV vaccine that some anti-vaxx types went apeshit over because there were ‘24 more deaths’ in the vaccinated group vs. the control. Then someone pointed out that most of those deaths were things like car crashes and were well within the noise level of the sample size.

569

Preach it. I had the thing when I was seven. Two weeks of misery in July. And then two more weeks of misery in August when my little brother caught it.

Anti-vaxxers are lunatics.

570

NEVER seen things come out of my children’s bottoms like that. It was spawn of satan time, real room-clearers. And my poor boy is only recently potty trained and just couldn’t understand why he was having accidents.

When you’re running a full load of laundry (sheets and pajama bottoms) because you’ve run out at 3 in the morning, you know you’re in for it.

571

Horrible. My kids have luckily been vaxxed. Are you in the US?

Because they don’t always vaccinate for cp in many overseas countries.

A blog post from a friend of mine about why they don’t in the UK: Just the Vax: Chicken pox vaccination policy in the UK - did it cost Elana's life?

Basically because people are already so scared from Wakefield’s lying about the MMR, they really can’t introduce another vax.

A friend of mine is an immigrant from Venezuela so she never got the vax or the disease in childhood. Some evil friends of her asked her to babysit their kids. They failed to tell her the kids had chicken pox. She was sick for two weeks and still has some scars across her face.

Ugh.

572

UK; they’re fully up-to-date with everything else, but I don’t think we’ve been offered the varicella vaccine. The docs always seem vaguely pleased when we say yes to all the vaccinations for everything else though.

Thanks for the link; it’s not nice to learn that chicken pox is not always benign, but makes me even more glad that mine have had it now as we apparently won’t be getting the vaccine.

573

Exactly. Perhaps curlcoat is just worried about the possibility that these vaccines could lead to being a cranky old messageboard wingnut.

574

Nitpick: I said that, not curlcoat.

575

curlcoat, maybe if you could help draw the line between “short term” and “long term” for us we could better understand what you are looking for. Where does long term start for you?

576

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Um…unless you’re retarded. If you’re retarded*, I guess I feel a bit bad for you, but still, shut your piehole and let the people with greater than room-temp IQs have a discussion.

*and there’s considerable evidence for this

577

Just out of sheer, morbid curiosity, how do the antivax twats like Curlcoat respond to the basic fact that:

We started giving polio vaccines, polio was pretty much eradicated
We started giving smallpox vaccines–we did eradicate it (yay us!)
We started giving measles vaccines–measles decreased to nearly nothing

But when the screwballs started protesting and not vaccinating their children, the incidents of these diseases have risen?

I mean–cause and effect, right? This isn’t that hard. What’s their…um…“reasoning”?

578

Better hygiene and treatments options, from what some here have linked.

579

Yeah, but those diseases aren’t really all that big a deal - we’re making a big fuss out of normal, healthy…uh…deaths. And besides, autism is happening now!

580

If people would just eat more riboflavin and vitamin K, there’d be no viral illnesses at all, don’t you know, Fenris?