Libertarian philosophy fits in neatly with the desire of many alt med believers that regulation of their potions and treatments should be abolished, including stripping the FDA of its already limited ability to keep ineffective and dangerous products off the market.
This includes the proponents of “health freedom” - a popular alt med buzz-phrase which can be translated as “the freedom to sell you whatever snake oil we want”. These people love Ron Paul; they stand to make a lot more money if someone like him ever gets in into a major position of power.
Of course, Orrin Hatch has already gifted the supplement industry with protection from FDA regulation via the DSHEA law (to be fair, another Senator well known for enabling the supplement pushers is Tom Harkin (D-Iowa)).
And that campaign of misinformation and fear is quite powerful.
Have you ever actually read the disclaimer agreement the parent is required to sign before the vaccine is given? I have, and it’s quite scary. It actually says one of the possible side effects is death.
My son had a horrible reaction to his first pertussus (sp?) vaccine, and I was advised to get him only the DT boosters in the future. Those are really hard to find believe it or not.
Then later when I was living in kind of hippie town and had my next child I was strongly advised by licensed medical persons that the risk of vaccination was higher than the risk of contracting any of the diseases the vaccinations covered. I was also treated like a monster when I requested a circumcision.
Fast forward another year and I’m living in a different place and a nurse’s aide is chasing my screaming terrified kid around the room with a syringe in her hand trying to poke the vaccination in on the fly while I’m begging her to stop just for a minute so I can put the kid on my lap to get the shot.
Sigh. The upshot is that things got better for us and I was soon able to skip the creepy free clinic and find a pediatrician who helped us get up to date on the vaccinations by the time my oldest was around 3, but man, what a nightmare.
If I had had better medical advice, or more support to make what were considered unpopular medical decisions for my children, or if we had better low income medical clinics…or or or…who knows.
My point I guess is that assuming that every parent who doesn’t vaccinate is a murdering moron might be a little short sighted.
Oh, I don’t bother about what conservatives think! I was complaining about centrists who waste their debating efforts on specific insurance-system symptoms of the problem, rather than whole-heartedly embracing UHC. (And BTW, the case for UHC can be made on grounds of efficiency even without positing compassion.)
We do need a fair amount of them, but there always seems to be a surplus. Still, if they were all gone there would be none to pinch at the grocery store when their mothers are looking the other way.
Apparently UK children are. It’s possible that because it’s part of a multipack it simply escaped your radar, I know many Spanish parents who know their kids got “the vaccines” but wouldn’t be able to tell you which vaccines exactly is that without calling the doctor.
I know these advisories can seem scary. But disclaimers like these are commonplace with a vast number of medical procedures and also apply to everyday prescription drugs that are regarded as safe (if you read the exhaustive list of side effects in the Physicians’ Drug Reference for virtually every medication, you’d conclude that some untoward event was unavoidable).
Still, vaccines have an excellent record of safety, side effects like local redness and swelling are typically quite mild and the rare marked reactions like high fever and convulsions, while certainly scary, do not as a rule cause permanent effects (note the permanent nervous system damage due to pertussis infection itself, as mentioned earlier). Pertussis vaccines are also safer these days thanks to use of a purified rather than whole cell vaccine (and it’s available for teenagers and adults too).
The people who “strongly advise” of this situation are generally correct - unless, for instance, you live in that area of California where kids are dying of pertussis infection, or anywhere for that matter where vaccine protection breaks down, herd immunity lessens and these diseases are given an opportunity to make a comeback.
That’s what they should have been “strongly advising” you about.
It comes back to that non-vaccinating mom who was aghast when she found out that parents of other kids using her daycare center were skipping vaccinations too. She was counting on others being diligent to immunize their kids so hers could benefit from that protection without facing the “risk” of vaccination.
What may seem like a wise individual decision fails when it becomes a community problem (as in Great Britain, when the MMR scare markedly lowered vaccination rates and measles outbreaks occurred).
To add to Jackmanii’s excellent post one of the many problems with the anti-vax loons is their constant fear mongering about alleged vaccine risks. Vaccine reactions are not the end of the world despite what they insist. In the first place most vaccine reactions are fairly uncommon. In the second place most are extremely minor and include problems like minor swelling at the site of injection.
The anti-vax literature makes vaccine reaction sound tremendously common when they aren’t. Your child is at far more at risk from the car ride to the pediatrician’s office than the vaccine itself.
My daughter had a vaccine reaction after her two month DTaP vaccine. Seven years later she’s sitting is in my living room right now reading a Terry Pratchet novel.
There is a third: me. I have vaccinated my children for most things, including pertussis, but I look at each vaccine and its health repurcussions individually, weigh their risks and benefits and my own child’s risk of exposure, as well as their risk of transmitting the illness to others. I also know my own ability and willingness to take a child to the doctor later on, so I don’t accept vaccine time tables made because it’s too hard to ensure a parent will bring their child back later, like infant Hep B shots.
Upshot? Varicella vaccine is delayed until age 12. If they can catch it naturally young, the immunity lasts longer and doesn’t wear off in teenagehood and young adulthood. If they can catch it and spend some time with adults of middle age, the adults are “boosted” against shingles without getting any symptoms. If they don’t catch it, then around age 12 is when chicken pox becomes dangerous, and so they’ll be vaccinated, and then that vaccine will last the next decade at least.
Hepatitis B? Again, not until they’re 12 and likely to become sexually active or IV drug users. There’s no other way for my children to get it or to spread it to others, so I see no medical reason to vaccinate against something they’re not at risk for.
HPV? Not only my daughter, but my son are getting this one, again, at 12 for her and now (17) for him because it was finally approved for boys. His risk of penile cancer from HPV is minuscule, but protecting him from becoming a carrier protects his future sexual partners as well.
I did think it was absolutely crazy that there is no adjusted vaccine schedule for preemies. My daughter’s first vaccines were supposed to be administered before her due date, before she was even out of the NICU. I absolutely refused that (and to their credit, no one on the staff made a fuss, and the nurse actually seemed relieved) and allowed (most of) her vaccines to be administered later according to her due date, not her birth date.
I’m not an anti-vaxer. I’m pro-rational thought. This means I don’t believe what “They” tell me, whether They are anti-vaxers or medical doctors, without doing some research on my own.
You started out by saying that you are the third kind of anti-vaxxer, and then as I read your post, I thought, “but…she’s not an anti-vaxxer, according to what she’s written here,” which is what I was planning to post as an answer to you. Then I got to the end, and you relieved me of the burden by saying it yourself! Thank you for that.
I must take issue with several of the assertions in your post, WhyNot.
Natural immunity from chicken pox often means, as it did for me, weeks of itching like mad followed by ugly scars. I had when I was seven and it sucks. If I can save my daughter from the same hell I’ll gladly do it. If a booster shot is necessary later on then so what? A shot is nothing compared to constant itching that even calomine lotion fails to relieve.
You also argue:
This is not correct. This is actually an anti-vax myth I’ve heard repeated many times.
According to the National Network for Immunization for Immunization Information:
In other words they’re not out there doing drugs or having sex and they still got it. Not only that but the disease is much more dangerous the earlier you get it:
So yes it makes sense to immunize young babies and kids against Hep B. You can indeed get Hep B even if you have no known risk factors. Should your child or baby acquire said disease that child or baby will be far more at risk from complications such as liver cancer than an older adult would.
Vaccinating babies and small children against Hep B is an extremely rational course of action.
As for premature babies and vaccines the general recommendation is to administer vaccines if the baby is medically stable:
I guess I meant, there’s a third kind of person who may not accept all the recommended vaccinations or the vaccination schedule mandated by my state. I suspect that’s enough to get me labeled an “anti-vaxxer” by some people.
Yeah, maybe, but that’s stretching the definition quite a bit. Certainly, it’s not descriptive of the crazytown groups I was referring to. You sometimes see the terms “non-vaxxer” and “selective vaxxer,” which are more appropriate in referring to people such as yourself, or people whose children can’t get vaccines due to other issues, and helpfully removes those folks from association with the crazytown people.
ETA: I should clarify my position somewhat: Though I personally don’t necessarily agree with your reasoning on these particular vaccinations, I don’t think that considering the vaccines individually, vs. following the recommendations across the board, necessarily makes a person anti-vax, especially if the set of vaccines they avoid is limited to the ones you named.
Ok, but my kids aren’t, because I don’t have Hep B.
That’s exactly what I mean by looking at each case individually.
I will, however, review the more current information about Hep B cases transmitted by other than sexual or blood contact. Thanks for pointing that out.
When I asked my pediatrician why we were vaccinating infants against Hep B, she flat out said, “Because it’s easier to do it now than trust you to bring her back when she’s older.” “Does she have any risk factors for it now?” I asked. “Nope,” she said. So we together decided to wait, schedule be damned.
You seem to be working under the same “Too much too soon” tagline that a lot of them like to use, which there’s no evidence for. And in fact studies which have spread out the time table and seperated vaccines combinations in preference to single vaccination shots rather than combination shots have shown no difference in immunity rates or vaccination reactions. As far as I know, there’s no evidence to support your beliefs and by delaying vaccinations you are increasing your children’s risks slightly.
So it’s anti-vaxing in a smaller degree - you’re not basing your decisions on the evidence, and increasing your children’s risk. You’re much better than not vaccinating them as all, but that may be why you get this reaction.
I can understand on some level. I was very resentful of being told to get a blood stick for HIV after giving birth. I have no known risk factors and am in a monogomous heterosexual relationship with a man who routinely donates blood. I can confidently state that there’s almost no way I have HIV.
At the same if your ped thinks that the only reason we’re vaccinating against Hep B is because of compliance failure later on your ped simply wrong.
I’m not sure WhyNot is really taking a “too much too soon” stance, as that’s based on concern of the total number of vaccines, not on looking at individual ones and deciding you think for that specific vaccine, the risks associated with getting that vaccine are greater than that of not getting it.
If I can take a stab at psychoanalyzing the people who do this (without offending anyone, I hope, especially WhyNot, who I would not in a million years want to offend), in my experience it tends to be people who don’t like the feeling of not being in control or feeling like you are letting people make decisions for you that you ought to be making for yourself. And feeling like you should have some understanding of the choices you are making for your kids. I have noticed that folks like this tend to focus on the three vaccines she mentioned, as they are the easiest to justify not getting, based on the risks as we know them. So, your kid is generally pretty well protected against most of the vaccine preventable diseases, the risk from the others isn’t too great, and the parent gets the bonus of feeling like he or she made an informed decision, vs. being a sheep.
I was complaining about centrists who waste their debating efforts on specific insurance-system symptoms of the problem, rather than whole-heartedly embracing UHC. (And BTW, the case for UHC can be made on grounds of efficiency even without positing compassion.)
