With those remarks, RFK Jr. has torched his last remaining shreds of credibility.
Paul Offit, a distinguished vaccine expert and inventor of a life saving rotavirus vaccine belongs in jail forever?
What a nutcase Bobby is.
As someone points out in the comments, it’s particularly tone deaf coming from a man with a notorious Nazi sympathizer for a grandfather.
I think that’s actually a pretty interesting question. I’m not quite sure I’m interpreting it how you meant it, though. Did you mean that parents used to be less concerned over the usual childhood disease or more concerned? It seems like you’re suggesting that they were less concerned, and so didn’t vaccinate as much. But vaccination rates have actually *fallen *over time; more of us got vaccinated than kids today. We weren’t vaccinated against chicken pox, no. But that’s because the chicken pox vaccine didn’t exist. We couldn’t do anything about it when we were kids, so we just got the chicken pox and dealt with it. We were definitely uncomfortable, and our parents worried about us, and we all hated every minute of it, and some number of us died from it (although admittedly not a whole lot.)
Now we CAN do something about it. A very easy, very cheap something that has been extensively studied and found safe. So what I don’t understand is why any parent who actually learns the facts would rather spend a miserable week with a miserable kid (or, possibly, a dead one.) The momentary pain and astronomically low risks of a simple needle stick vs. missing a week of work and 7 sleepless nights full of oatmeal baths and calamine lotion? Sign me up!
But most of us (If you’re 35 or older, which I believe you are) *did *get what vaccinations were available at the time. Again, vaccination rates have fallen over time; more of us got vaccinated than kids today. Our own mothers remembered how horrible measles and mumps were…fevers, sweats, pain, rashes…(and I don’t care who you are; if your kid has the measles, there is a point at 2am when you’re terrified they’re going to die. Certain they’re going to die, even when they don’t.) They weren’t panicking over it; they probably had measles and mumps and survived, but…why? Why do that to your own kid (and yourself!) when there’s an alternative?
But now we have a bunch of parents who have never had measles or mumps. Some who even never had chicken pox. So they’re no longer motivated by their own memories of misery. Instead, we’ve come to frame the conversation in fear. The pro-vaccination side tries to scare people into vaccinating with dire tales of complications and death from vaccine preventable illnesses. It works for some people, but others believe if they eat right and they do their yoga, then their kids won’t get it or they’ll just be sick for a couple of days and survive. They in turn use fear of science and vaccine safety to try to justify their refusal. It’s fear on both sides.
Fear is a dicey motivator. Personal interest would be a better marketing strategy, in my opinion. Billboards with exhausted mothers and cranky calamine covered babies. But that won’t have maximum impact until we cycle through again and the babies of today who *are *getting ill will have children of their own, whom they will probably vaccinate.
I test positive to the skin test because my idiot lab partner in Microbiology spilled a test tube on me. It contained a relative of the TB bug, which doesn’t cause TB but causes a positive test. I haven’t been able to afford the QuantiFerontest which might be more accurate, so it’s annual x-rays for me.
Note I said all of those vaccinations, meaning I’d have trouble giving all of them. Also note that if you didn’t cut out so much of the posts, I also said “without looking into ongoing research”.
Other mammals are protected by their vaccinated mothers as long as they are nursing - is this not true of humans?
How many times do you want me to respond to the same thing? I have already said that I didn’t see or misread that there had been long term studies on the one vaccination and MS, which you even said further on. Now, in this whole mess, I did forget that cite, so I was wrong to say that I had been provided a cite but given that most of this thread has been about yelling at me for things I haven’t said, I’d say it isn’t all that surprising that I forgot it.
However, I sort of mis-spoke when I said hooray I got a cite, because it still isn’t what I’m asking. But ya know what? I’m heading to Tennessee and most likely won’t have time nor interest for this thread any more, so we’ll just leave it that as far as we know, giving babies 25 vaccinations before age 2 has nothing to do with the rise in auto-immune diseases.
I’m thinking that vaccinating for some of the things that kids get these days are not dangerous diseases for the most part. So it seems short sighted to do it if no one knows what the long term repercussions might be.
Interesting that all of a sudden he has decided to disagree with me, despite agreeing earlier. Shrug.
:rolleyes: They are apparently studying whether this antigen might cause this disease, or if that one causes that one. What I have been concerned with all along is the cumulative effect of all of the antigens in a short period of time on the long term health of the immune system. Despite my making that clear, no one has ever addressed it.
Less concerned, but the vaccinations for chicken pox, mumps and measles weren’t available when I was a child. Back then, those were things we just expected to get at some time and I don’t remember there being any serious concern when it happened. Neither my brother nor I went to the dr when we got chicken pox and I didn’t when I got the mumps, I don’t remember if he did.
Well, neither of us had that bad of a case, but it isn’t any individual vaccination I’m concerned about, its the sheer numbers that very young kids get these days, very close together.
I’m pushing 56. I got three vaccinations, which right now I forget which ones - polio and smallpox for sure.
Well, then, I guess if anyone I should be telling everyone to go get their kids stuck with as many shots as possible, since I never had the measles and I understand it’s far worse as an adult. Gotta have that herd immunity to protect me! :dubious:
Other mammals live, breed and die in the same few acres of land and only make contact with the plants and animals that they’ve been in contact with for many many generations. If I had chosen to never live in college dorms, I probably could have gotten away with not getting the meningococcal vaccine. If I never garden, never do any carpentry and never walk barefoot outside, I probably don’t need a tetanus shot and so on and so forth.
And breast milk only protects the infant against infections the mother’s immune system has antibodies for. There’s loads of crap on your skin that your body makes no antibodies for.
OK then, to be specific - when I have a litter, the mother of the pups has been all over the west and to some places east.
Quite so, but the subject was why do human babies need to get vaccinated at birth if they are being breast fed? Unless there is no history of the mother getting such and such vaccination, wouldn’t the baby be protected as long as it was nursing?
The answers to your questions and so much more lie just beyond this link.
I think they shot the wrong Kennedy.
Yes, which you then backpedaled to say of course you’d get any kids you were responsible for vaccinated, even without your research finding any answers:
“I am in no way anti-vax no matter what you want to believe, and would certainly get any kids I might be responsible for shots for anything serious they would likely be exposed to even without any answers to my concerns.”
Apparently the strength of your convictions on this subject is waning.
Because babies aren’t vaccinated at birth. The immunisation program starts (at least here in Australia) at 8 weeks of age. Which is why newborns and small infants (< 2 months) are so vulnerable: when immunisation rates are down in the general population, it is these children who cop the worst of it.
You’re welcome.
kambuckta, the Hepatitis B vaccine is given at birth or almost at birth in the states. Most of the other vaccines start at birth, but that one starts right away.
curlcoat, they changed the vaccine schedule because they found it was not needed, and was just exposing the animals to the (short term and according to available data, very rare) side effects. So they used science. They still have the complete puppyhood/kittenhood series (which would be equivalent to the childhood series). They did not change it because of auto-immunity problems later in age (because that has not been found).
According to the CDC, HepB can be given at birth, the others start at 2 months.
Breast feeding tends to confer passive immunity which is weaker and temporary compared to active immunity. Breast feeding can certainly provide some protection against minor infections like colds or gastrointestinal bacteria and stimulate development of the baby’s immune system (so that it can better fight off serious diseases) and is even linked to reducing allergies, but breast milk can not provide the same level of protection for diseases that vaccines can via *active (artificial) immunity*.
The antibodies in breast milk are produced by the mothers body/immune system in response to a pathogen. Not the same level as the baby’s immune system producing it’s own antibodies in response to a pathogen.
(Sorry if this has been mentioned. Didn’t wade through all 11 pages)
OTOH, giving vaccines while the baby has good passive immunity may not help with the development of the baby’s own immune system. Since she/he already has antibodies that will respond to the vaccine antigen (via the mom).
The Hep B case may be one where the vaccine status of the mother is unknown, the mother is not vaccinated (the Hep B vaccine came out while I was a teenager, at the beginning was not “on schedule”, and I’m not THAT old), or perhaps, even though the mother is vaccinated, not enough antibodies are passed through colostrum to provide a good immunity. Lastly, unlike other diseases, this is one that newborns can acquire during birth.
Couple of reasons: the primary being that it provides immunity to only the pathogens* in the mother’s body while she’s breastfeeding*.
Remember, you only have a few searching antibodies to measles circulating in your system at any one time. This is true whether you were vaccinated or had measles yourself. Only if and when those searcher antibodies bump into a measles virus will they set off the immune system’s alarm and cause it to make disease fighting antibodies to fight off the infection. So if the baby is exposed to measles before mom’s immune system is exposed to measles, her body will not put any antibodies into the milk. Only when mom picks up a virus inside *her *body (or, possibly, on her skin from skin-to-skin-contact with the infant; we’re not sure about that yet) will fighting antibody production start.
That’s what we really mean by “short term immunity”. It doesn’t mean immunity for the duration of breastfeeding. It’s only immunity for the term of the mother’s body’s awareness that the pathogen is in the area. If her baby gets measles first, it may be too late for mom’s immune system to notice and react.
And even that only applies for some illnesses. For reasons we don’t understand, breastfeeding appears to confer no immunity to pertussis. Maybe that’s one that our body hasn’t evolved skin level awareness of, maybe it takes longer for our bodies to recognize it and the virus has already replicated to levels that breastmilk antibodies can’t fight, we’re just not sure. But we do know that breastfed babies die of pertussis, whether their moms were vaccinated or had pertussis themselves as children. That one is particularly important that we have herd immunity to, since an newborn’s body simply won’t make antibodies against pertussis, even if you vaccinate them at birth. It just won’t work. Which is why the first shot for pertussis is at 2 months; then it will begin to work, but it still requires two more shots for full immunity and boosters in middle school and college. Pertussis is just a bitch, as our body apparently “forgets” that one quite easily.
There are others that breastfeeding doesn’t protect against, I just don’t recall which ones at the moment.
Why the :dubious:? Yes, that’s exactly what you should be doing, for exactly that reason. It’s not just about protecting the kids, it’s about protecting you, too.
So…you are retarded? Good to know.
Schools closed because of measles outbreaks. During “Polio summers”, kids were kept largely indoors and away from public gathering places (like swimming pools) because it was thought that polio was spread that way). We’re down from hundred of thousands of cases of polio per year, to around 1000 and we’re damned close to eradicating it.
Look at the following words, and try to sound them out and comprehend them, you ignorant chimpanzee’s twat…and try to learn from them:
[ul]
[li]We have eradicated smallpox. [/li]
[li]We nearly eradicated measles. [/li]
[li]We’re on the verge of eliminating polio.[/li]
[li]Tetanus won’t be eradicated but it’s down to a rare problem. [/li]
[li]There are dozens of other diseases that used to decimate the population and are now mostly nuisances (influenza, for example)[/ul][/li]
WHAT WE ARE DOING IS WORKING. you spoiled, self-indulgent, douchebag.
Which diseases would you like the little kids to get, Darth Curlcoat? Polio? Tetanus? Rubella?
If you’re so convinced that vaccines are bad, go geterself infected with polio or measles and see how you like the consequences you’re so blithely wishing on others, you dumb bitch.
And once you’ve got one of those diseases, maybe you can give your hero, Jenny McCarthy, a good ol’ analingus-y rim-job and see if you can infect her too.
Seems like you got the “anti-stupid, spoiled asshole” vaccine, since you clearly have a bad case of it, you goat-feltching, cum-burping gutter whore.
If it was up to me, I’d wish you’d personally contract every single disease that can be prevented with a vaccine and then live a long, long, loooooong and painful life. Kinda like you’re doing to babies who you want to suffer.
According to an interview I did with Dr. Offit himself, immunity via breast feeding does not last in most cases past six months. That’s not long enough. Little kids are more vulnerable to many vaccine preventable diseases than adults are. They get more side effects. You and I might be able to shrug off pertussis as no more than a bout of unpleasant coughing but a baby will face the very real risk of long term side effects such as brain damage.
In the meantime I would like to offer a round of applause to Fenris. Every single fucking question** curlcoat **asked was answered in this thread. Repeatedly.
Is the interview included in the book, or is there something similar elsewhere? The reason I ask is because of the focus on breastfeeding, I have seen some ads/memes where they’re more “if you breastfeed you don’t have to vaccinate the babies at all”. I’d like to see something to have as munition against that. If I ever have kids, they will be breastfed for a while, and also get their vaccines on time.
PS. I do know that in other animals, passive immunity transfer stops long before weaning (very important in some species). So I know that maternal antibodies in animals are not continuous throughout lactation. I just don’t know how it works in humans (humans have cooties).
Quite definitely a woman.
I’ll have to go through my notes. But I interviewed Dr. Offit literally while I was nursing and pumping for my youngest. He told me that nursing offers some immunity for certain diseases but it wears off after a certain time typically at about six months. Any benefit that a baby gets after that point comes from good nutrition and bonding with mommy more than an immune effect.
If nursing offers so much protection against vaccine preventable diseases why were infant mortality rates so high before the introduction of vaccines? Especially when most babies were breastfed as no real other alternatives were available.
I can ask Dr. Offit for more info. He was so kind and helpful while we were writing our book. I’ll also ask my fellow pro-vax peeps on Facebook That would probably make a really good article for a major magazine or newspaper . . . .
WhyNot’s excellent post has some very good additional details.