Anti-vaxxers are willingly and knowingly, in many cases, rejecting established FACT in order to support their prejudices and desire to make themselves feel smarter than they actually are. They place their children’s lives, and the lives of other children, in jeopardy in order to service their own pitiful needs for feeling important and informed, even when educated over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and OVER again about the facts regarding vaccinations.
I will admit that most of them are simply stupid and easily manipulated, but some of them are genuinely eager to condemn their own children and other people’s children to disease and death to service their own egos.
So, in my opinion, they deserve MORE vitriol, frankly.
But how does your self-referential quote indicate that “big pharma” does active, malevolent harm?
As near as I can tell, pharmaceutical companies make money - perhaps too much, in some cases - but they are in business to extend lives and improve quality of lives. They make profits. But they don’t seem to actively harm people.
Not to be trite, but can you offer a reputable cite or two?
Vaccination not only keeps your kids from getting sick, it keeps the people around them from getting sick, or from bringing it home to someone who can get sick.
For example, the sprog got the varicella vaccine not only to protect him from the chicken pox, but to protect me from shingles. I have a history of that disease that makes me susceptible to it again. I know it’s not a perfect solution, but as long as irresponsible parents continue to host “pox parties” and send their kids to school while they’re infectious but before the active symptoms hit, it’s far better than nothing.
Another (and better) example is the mini-epidemic of whooping cough that is going around one of the elementary schools, and which an older sibling is surely going to get and bring to the high school. My guiding teacher has advised me to see my doctor to get boosters, and to make sure I keep up with them. I know the sprog and Airman are current on theirs, but I can’t remember if I am or not, and I’m OK with getting them again if it means I don’t catch something.
Frankly, I agree with kolga. It’s important to ask questions of your pediatrician and get the facts. But too often, “skepticism” really means “ignorance and unwillingness to learn.” If you want to sacrifice your child to your “skepticism,” that’s one thing. But I’ll be damned if you’re going to take my child with him. That’s just stupid and selfish.
There is no rising incidence of autism. It’s an impression created from greater vigilance and testing, and from classifying more syndromes as autism spectrum disorders. If you apply modern standards of autism diagnosis to previous cases, you’d have more diagnoses in the older group.
How would you feel if you found out giving your kids cheerios for breakfast was likely to make them child molesters? That’s equally as baseless, except that cheerios haven’t prevented gazillions of cases of horrible disease to offset even that potential harm even if it were true.
It doesn’t cause autism. It’s not an open question, we’ve got very solid data. There’s no indication, whatsoever, that there’s any truth to that claim. It was a lie created by a guy paid to find some reason to sue vaccine manufacturers and it spread as a conspiracy theory. So why even ask that question? It doesn’t somehow justify their stances.
It’s not going to happen and as Senorbeef points out the ‘rise’ is mostly an illusion brought on by people who don’t understand the new diagnoses and statistics.
That said, we’d still probably find vaccines well worth it. Kids have died of Pertussis this year as a result of a lowered herd immunity. Imagine the size of the outbreaks if we dropped vaccines due to a small possibility of it causing autism. Let me ask you, since you are the parent: would you like autistic kids or kids coughing themselves to death?
all I know is that anti-vax people, like truthers, tend to believe any sensationalism they read as gospel truth. No matter how irrational, unfounded or just plain loopy, if they read it, it must be true.
First, they are parasites, because it’s the NIH who does most the actual research. The companies just patent the drug and market it. They might tweak the molecule with some side groups that don’t really do anything, other than allow them to differentiate the drug.
Second, they bribe doctors to prescribe their drugs.
Third, they have corrupted research in a number of ways, including creating their own research organizations in order to avoid dealing with academic scientists:
That’s all I can think of off-hand, but there is really much more.
There is a certain irony in many anti-vaxers being left wing, becuase they are using the same play book as Sarah Palin, Beck, and other slime weasels. Ignore facts, make outrageous claims, complain of persecution when called on your bullshit, and then use appeals to populism. Just substitute lame-stream media with Big Pharma.
The fact is, there are companies making obscene profits from promoting utterly worthless herbal and homeopathic medicines, and people getting rich selling books full of advice that actually hurts people.
This is not corporations vs the little people, or govt vs the populace, it’s ignorance, fear, and greed vs science and facts.
of course it could also be the actions of people who see humanity as being over populated and vaccinations are over-riding one of nature’s means of population control.
I’m pretty sure I wasn’t referring to you at all, but to a story in an old thread about a non-Doper who was not specifically identified.
The vitriol, such as it is, is not directed at parents who are confused by conflicting and inaccurate information, but at the virulent antivaxers who run organizations and websites dedicated to spreading lies and conspiracy-mongering about vaccination. Antivax efforts date back to the first public immunization programs in the 19th century, based in part on hatred of government, fears about needles and adulteration of our pristine bodily fluids :rolleyes:, and these folks have gleefully seized on misguided fears about vaccination and autism as a further means of spreading their poison.
Some defenders of immunization do get riled up at the threat antivaxers pose to our children and public health in general, but our “vitriol” does not extend to death threats (as have been received by at least one vaccine defender, Dr. Paul Offit), harassing legal actions* and banning differing opinions from Internet forums.
The irony here is that some of the more daft antivaxers are convinced that vaccines are part of a Big Pharma/One World plot to wipe out a large part of the world’s population through whatever toxic effects they claim vaccines exhibit. It has never been clear to me why Big Pharma wants to depopulate the world, seeing that the more people exist, the more drugs they can sell. But logic has never been important to conspiracy theorists.
Pro-immunization folks do not support everything the pharmaceutical industry does, but condemning vaccination or anything else even remotely connected to drug companies on the basis that it’s all a Big Pharma conspiracy is ludicrous, not to mention that we’d have to toss the great majority of current medical practice out the window and go back to bleeding patients and exorcising devils.
*as an example of harassing legal action, a librarian who runs a website dealing with autism and related conditions was targeted by a lawyer involved in a lawsuit against a drug company (details available here) with a subpoena ordering her to produce a vast amount of personal information under the theory that she was somehow a “co-conspirator” in the case (which she was not a party to). The subpoena was quashed by the judge in the case, who harshly criticized the lawyer, had him reported to the state bar and ordered him to attend a course on ethics and federal civil procedure rules.
I know of no such abuses committed by pro-immunization folks.
First off, I don’t know enough about the issue to draw any conclusions, but to my best memory, I don’t believe I was every immunized against whooping cough or measles or German measles, though I do have memories of small pox, polio, and tb vaccinations. Given the fact that I am 60 years old, I believe that the pertussis vaccination program was not available at that time.
I did contract both forms of measles, and the mumps, which were never considered a big deal. Whooping cough was rare, but I did understand when I was a kid that it was serious and very unpleasant. A whooping cough outbreak somewhere in Canada got press. Not often though.
The present fear of a Pertussis outbreak led me to do a little surfing. I find that the enormous fear of fatalities ignore the fact that by the time of the 50s the fatality rate had been severely reduced despite a widespread vaccination program .
You’ll notice the low fatality rate just prior to the mid 50s when widespread pertussis vaccination programs began. This information is only available on anti vaccination sites with an anti-mainstream agenda so the veracity is questionable, but it does concur with my juvenile memories and I can’t find contrary evidence.
So to answer your question is very difficult for me at this time. Its not a simple question of do you prefer autism over agonizing death. If I had the choice for my self, I would prefer agonizing death over mental handicap. However any choice for my children would involve my best knowledge of probabilities as well with a definite weight towards avoiding autism.
Assuming the connection between autism and pertussis vaccination is proven of course.
OK, first of all note that the graph is deaths per 100,000, and while the rate is going down that is not due to some magic that anti-vaxxers perscribe - it is due to improved treatments by the medical community that reduce the deaths by pertussis, but do not reduce the number of cases. Did your sources list the number of cases of pertussis? I doubt it.
From your own memories, and if nothing else from some searching you should know that pertussis, even if not fatal, can be a brutal disease to have: broken ribs from coughing, choking spells as well pneumonia, brain damage, and mental retardation are complications. Did these show up on the anti-vaxxers graphs? I suspect more people got brain damage from pertussis than from vaccines even if there was a link between vaccines and autism.
Another factor not covered in that graph: Is that graph in any way breaking things out by age groups? Getting pertussis as an adult is not as big an issue as getting one as a child or infant. If you were to break those deaths down by age groups you would probably see the death rates for 100,000 increase. I have few doubts that the anti-vaxxers happily tossed in adult cases in to swamp the stats with survivors.
Um anyone who considers measles, whooping cough or the mumps not a big deal knows very little about those diseases. Measles is one of the world’s most contagious diseases and has complications that include pneumonia and encephalitis. Complications from the mumps include hearing loss, swollen testicles and pancreatitis. Whooping cough is somewhat less dangerous in adults in the sense that they probably won’t die from it but it’s awful in little tiny babies. A newborn with it faces a one in one hundred risk of death and a one in two hundred and fifty risk of brain damage.
The risks of the vaccine are far lower. There’s a reason the vaccines were developed and even better reasons vaccine usage is recommended highly by all credible health authorities.
You are not only quoting a blog but an anti vax blog:
The author repeatedly defends discredited loons like Andrew Wakefield and links to other bad sources of information such as the Age of Autism where they truly believe that vaccines are responsible for autism.
Pertussis has ALWAYS been a bad illness. Do you think that babies weren’t dying of it prior to vaccines?
There is NO goddamned connection between vaccination and autism! The issue has been studied and studied and studied again.
This is why I hate the anti-vaxxers and their leaders and their movement.
You know what? Parenting is hard as hell. You constantly make decisions and then question the decisions you’ve made all the time. The anti-vax movement takes the easiest parenting decision of them all – vaccination – and attempts to make it hard.
It isn’t. If your baby can be vaccinated then your baby should be vaccinated. If your baby cannot be vaccinated then you’d damned well better lobby others to vaccinate their children as it is the only protection yours will ultimately have.
For that alone they can rot. Their ribs can break from whooping cough. Their reproductive organs can swell up from mumps. They can get liver cancer from Hep B, pneumonia from Hib and choked off breathing from diphtheria.
What they can’t get – despite all the pretending – is autism from vaccines.
I for one, am absolutely 100% against this murder of babies. Babies are our future and we don’t have one if babies keep dying these horrible deaths right under our noses.
Who are these monster parents who murder their small innocent babies with tiny cute feet and adorable smiles? Their ribs break, organs swell, they get cancer and choke off and no one cares?
Thank you LB for bringing this grave atrocity that has been going on right in our backyard to our attention. You truly do care for all our babies judging from how passionate and furious you are about it. Its good to know intelligent and hardworking people like you are protecting our babies from murder. You take the time to go on-line and research all these websites, crunch all these numbers and have the aptitude to tell truth from lies. I salute you.
We should totally establish a federal agency with any and all powers necessary to stop this bloodshed of babies in our society.
What’s the advantage of waiting until they’re 12 for the Hep B shot?
Can you provide a cite for chicken pox contraction being more effective at protection in teenagehood and young adulthood than the vaccine? Or that adults get a booster against zoster if they’re around kids with chickenpox?
Also, keep in mind the herd immunity that the varicella vaccine provides. Unprotected adults can get it from little kids and have serious consequences.
I’m just a bit older than you & received the DTP combo. Beginning when I was a baby–so I don’t remember it as vividly as I remember the polio shots (they bussed us to schools during the summer to get the very first Salk vaccine) & those nasty smallbox boosters.
I caught both kinds of measles, mumps & chicken pox, since those vaccines were “before my time.” I remember that being sick was unpleasant longer than the hated shots; but I was lucky–no long-term damage. TB vaccines have never been common in the USA.
If I’d had kids, they would have gotten the immunizations recommended at the time. And I’ve got a cousin with Autism; not one of those vaguely Autistic/Asperger’s disorders, but the kind that prevented him ever becoming verbal & led to institutionalization as an adult. Nothing I’ve ever read has convinced me there is a link with vaccination.
We are offered free flu shots at work–got mine last week!
Back in the 50s, the measles and mumps were so common amongst primary graders , occuring every year, that just about everyone was expected to get it . In fact, it was considered a good thing to get it when you were young, because it served to give you immunity which would hold you in good stead for your adulthood when those diseases involved further complications.
I have a problem with the 8000 fatality figure
Just prior in the 30s we have these annual numbers from emedicine
So the mortality rate double in one decade while the incidence decreased ? Something doesn’t add up.
Anyway I hope you get your annual flu shots. Forty thousand (40,000) people die each year in the US as a result of the flu. Just think of how many lives would be saved if we all got them. Yet no one seems to care about that.
Uh, lots of people are pretty big in advocating flu shots. Especially for those at risk, like the infirm or elderly. It’s not as big a deal to random healthy young people.
