The more I think about this, the more angry I get. This woman describes how she was glad when she asked if she could get an exemption form that the clerk didn’t know what one was. (Yay! No one else has asked for one! My darling baby will be SAFE!) Then got scared when a second clerk knew exactly where the forms were (Oh no! What if someone who isn’t vaccinated brings a DISEASE into this daycare and infects my darling baby!) She says that she hates to think of relying on other kids being vaccinated to keep her child safe, but that it’s just reality.
Well, of course they haven’t done the research! Doctors and Big Pharm don’t want it done because then they’d have to stop eviscerating women and snatching their babies after they’ve made big money pumping them full of drugs!
zoid, although vaccinations are required for entrance into school (and usually daycares), you can get religious and/or philosophical exemptions in most states in the U.S. What’s scary is that I’ve seen some anti-vaxers balk at getting the vaccinations that were required by their nursing schools! That’s frightening on a number of different levels.
Yeah, the really really really dumb thing about the mercury==autism theory is that it seems only really really really small doses of mercury cause autism. The people who got massive doses of mercury back in the old days when we just dumped it into the rivers? No higher incidence of autism.
Same with pesticides. We have farm workers that are exposed to pesticide concentrations thousands and thousands of times greater than people eating fruit from the supermarket. If pesticides were going to kill you, or destroy your immune system, or whatever, why don’t farm workers show much much higher rates of such diseases?
Or electromagnetic fields. People who work in some industries like power generation are exposed to electromagnetic fields thousands of times greater than you get from your cell phone, or under a power line, or from a TV. Yet they don’t seem to get sick at a higher rate than other people.
This is a woosh, right?
I smoked for 10 years, so I should have lung cancer. But I don’t, so the whole “smoking kills” thing is a joke. Right?
To address some of the earlier posts: When my oldest child is diagnosed autistic, and I know that statistically there is a higher probability that son #2 might have the same, and at the same time there is a lot of buzz about Vaccines, and specifically Thimerosol, possibly being a causal factor - something that fits perfectly with what I observed in child #1, and it is time to have child #2 injected with a plethora of Thimerosol laced vaccines - does it really make me an “asshole”, believing “tabloid crap” if I question the wisdom of that ? If so, how about you go spend some quality time with the horse you rode in on?
For the record, we decided to have him vaccinated, but I’m still not sure it was the right call. And it sure was agonizing to make that decision. But hey, that’s just 'cause I’m ignorant, right?
I’m not entirely in the Thimerosol=Autism camp, there isn’t enough good research either way, and I seriously doubt the answer is going to be that simple anyway.
But there’s a lot of bad research “disproving” the link - the latest one today in the NEJM - in the news as “Mercury containing Vaccine Vindicated” A useless study as regards this discussion, as
the study assessed only those children who were exposed to mercury during the first 28 days to 7 months of life. The “Thimerosol = Autism” camp in the autism community has always asserted that autism is caused by a build up of mercury in the system as a result of multiple vaccinations over the first two years of life. This study did not address this hypothesis at all. It also doesn’t look like any of the subjects in the study were actually assessed for Autism spectrum disorders.
But hey, read the headline, and call concerned parents ignorant for questioning this stuff.
Personally, I am a bitch. In the worst possible way. I would be throwing a tantrum at the daycare and letting every other parent know that this psycho is bringing an unvaccinated kid into the joint. I would be looking for another daycare for my kids (or at the very least threatening it) and maybe mentioning to the psycho (while coughing all over the place) that my aunt/uncle/brother/cousin/mistress just got back from Africa and that we’re pretty sure he/she/they have measles, rubella, chicken pox and oh, I donno, ebola? I would seriously fuck with her. But I am a bitch, YMMV.
Well Isosleepy, what I’m really pitting here is the attitude that this woman has…that in order to protect her unvaccinated child, that she is hoping everyone else IS vaccinating their children. It’s a selfish and antisocial attitude. If people believe that vaccines are more risky than exposing their child to potentially fatal diseases, then they need to be prepared for that exposure and the possible consequences.
But in response to your post, why do you think that the medical community has not established a link between thimerosol and autism, and why do you think that autism rates are just as high now, even though vaccines no longer contain thimerosol? I’m not trying to challenge you, because I can imagine that it was a tough decision to make in deciding to vaccinate your second child, but I’m curious as to what you make of those questions.
But you do know that they don’t use thimerosol in vaccines any more, right?
If thimerosol was a major contributing factor to autism, why haven’t new autism diagnoses fallen since then?
That said, I have no problem if you demand a no-thimerosol vaccine for your child, and that’s what you’ll get in almost all cases, even if you don’t demand it.
I can’t help but wonder what the anti-vax crowd’s response would be to a tour of a third world country where children still die of the diseases we regularly vaccinate against. Most of them are of an age that mumps, measles, rubella, diphtheria, polio, and the other diseases of childhood simply weren’t around while they were growing up. They don’t have the real, visceral experience of knowing a family who lost a child, or losing a friend, or suffering through a bout themselves.
Herd immunity kicks in at around 90%, IIRC, which means that these people are protected by our willingness to endure the small, but not insignificant, risks that come with vaccinations. If I were dictator of the world, I would require that anyone asking for an exemption first work for 100 days on various communicable disease wards in India, Nigeria, or Mexico. They have to take their children with them, and they won’t have access to American quality health care during their work.
If they still think it’s such a great idea afterwards, they can have an exemption.
phouka, you are so right. My mom always says that she doubts you would see someone of her generation every oppose vaccines, because they remember the fear mothers had of their children contracting these diseases.
I don’t want to be a spokesperson for the Thimerosal=Autism crowd, as I said before, I don’t think there is enough decent research either way. When it came time to vaccinate son #2, Thimerosal free was not an option - by the way, despite reports to the contrary, Thimerosal laced vaccine was used well into 2002.
I don’t know why Autism diagnoses haven’t dropped. Better reporting? Exposure to other Hg sources? Maybe Autism is a combination of different conditions, caused by different things. Or different combinations of things. Heck, maybe Thimerosal did have nothing to do with it.
I do know that the methodology of the research I saw “proving” absolutely no connection between Thimerosal and Autism was flawed, at least to me. That doesn’t prove there is a connection, not in the least - but it does mean that questioning the wisdom of vaccination is not merely ignorance.
What was difficult for me at the time is that I wanted to believe that vaccination was entirely safe. I have a problem with conspiracy nuts, and needless alarmist internet-spread bs (and there is plenty of it in the Autiusm community: Chelation, anyone?) But after reading up on it I could only conclude there was a lot of pressure to declare Thimerosal safe, but no real research to back it up. Now Vaccines are Thimerosal free. Why couldn’t that be done 10 years ago?
Oh HELL, yeah! I was immunized to most childhood diseases the ol’ fashioned way, with some of the afteraffects to show for it. Thankfully, I was born after penicillin or I probably wouldn’t be here.
Yeah! Hell, I’m probably STILL shipping around more mercury per gram than your typical autistic kid. Strontium 90, too.
But the thing is, we know for a fact that vaccines aren’t 100% safe.
We know for a fact that some kids are going to get sick from vaccines, never mind thimerosol. And some of those kids will die, it happens even today.
We vaccinate not because vaccines are 100% safe, but because the alternative means waves of infectious diseases. A couple generations ago vaccines were seen as godsends, becuase parents would routinely see their children die from infectious diseases that are virtually unknown today. It’s only because vaccination has been so successful that we even consider that .001% risk that your child will get sick from the vaccine, and not the 90% risk they’d get sick if there were no vaccines.
Of course, were I live there are is a huge no-vaccination movement. And of course, every few years we have an epidemic of whooping cough. If everyone else got vaccinated against whooping cough it would make sense not to vaccinate your kid with the risky whooping cough vaccine, because the risk of contracting whooping cough would be near zero. But if everyone thinks like you, then no one will get vaccinated. And human beings are notoriously poor at asessing risk. We’ll reject a very small risk from a vaccine, or from flying in a plane, only to choose a much higher risk that we imagine we have “control” over, like driving or playing football. How many people die every year on the freeways?
And of course, some people can’t be vaccinated due to compromised immune systems, or they haven’t been vaccinated yet because they’re too young. And the more healthy unvaccinated people, the greater the reservoir of infectious disease that can expose unhealthy unvaccinatable people.
Isn’t assessing the risk of flying a bit more complex than total deaths? Shouldn’t you compare numbers of flyers vs. numbers of car travellers, total hours flown vs.total hours driven, and what the odds are of dying in a plane crash vs. dying in a car wreck, for example?
On average, what percentage of people on board a plane die when it crashes? What percentage of people die in a car when it crashes?
But the correct way to assess the risk is deaths per mile traveled. In other words, if 100,000 people fly from New York to LA how many deaths can you expect, and if 100,000 people drive how many deaths can you expect.
You will see many more fatalities in the driving group.
Your other numbers aren’t relevant in themselves. The number of people who die in a typical plane crash vs typical car crash only matters when you multiply that by the risk of crashing and the distance traveled.
I suppose you are right, although I suspect very few people drive from NY to LA, so it might not be a fair comparison.
Perhaps, but there is an element of control in driving that you glossed over in your comment. If I am an excellent driver, and drive the safest car, and drive defensively, I can lower my risk greatly from the average. In a plane, I have no control at all. In a plane, you cannot jimmy the odds. In a car, you can.
This assertion that there is not enough research either way, Isosleepy, is just poop, to be frank.
There are ample studies, including several very large scale epidemiological studies that should turn up a relationship, if there was one. The thing is that the assertion is that thimerosal or mercury causes autism. That’s the claim, and that is where the evidence has to be. If there is not evidence in that direction, there shouldn’t be any meaningful claim.
However, here are a few examples of the studies that have been done that have failed to find a link. There are significantly more studies available than just these - I present them as a sampler.