I’m agnostic on the subject of vaccines in general, but lately have been annoyed by one “conservative” after another declaring them utterly safe and absolutely essential to the working of civilized society. People skeptical of vaccination, in their view, are ignorant luddites, utterly apathetic toward the health of their own children and society in general. Perhaps they should be forcibly vaccinated, for everyone’s good. The Alex Jones-class fears of vaccines and autism have been getting a lot of play for purposes of ridicule, as a way of sidestepping discussions of more well-documented hazards.
Funny, conservatives hate it when liberals use those rhetorical tactics, but I actually appreciate it when topics like this come up. They remind me, since I used to self-identify as one, that conservatives are every bit as much in favor of coercive government as are liberals – they just want the right tyrants to be in charge. It’s a completely false dichotomy, a fact of which I need occasional reminders. But I digress.
The latest “crisis” over measles is a perfect case in point. Here at The Dollar Vigilante is an article reminding us that not so long ago – within the lifetimes of a lot of us – measles was considered both epidemic and no threat at all, just a normal part of childhood to be gotten over with. Indeed some childhood illnesses like mumps were actually sought out by parents, because if you had to suffer through them it was a lot better to do it as a child.
Not to suggest that the troika of ‘childhood diseases’ were completely without hazard themselves, because they weren’t. I myself had what was then called the ten-day measles, and a few months later I abruptly became very myopic and forever lost all hope of one day being lionized in a movie about what a great long-range killer I am. I’ve always been convinced it was the measles that did that to me so like I said at the beginning, my negativity toward vaccines goes no deeper than agnosticism. And yes, the arguments against them can sound kinda silly. But then, so can some of the arguments in favor.
A lot of the problems come from the same source as the hype and hysteria over diet and so forth. A risk/benefit evalutaion, especially on an individual basis, is almost never part of the argument. Just as with anything else, not all vaccines (or their production methods) are created equal, but when government is the only source, basically, and is the only judge of that quality, it’s mighty hard for the average person to make any kind of sound judgment, regardless of their political bent.
One thing that stands out for me as a disqualification of the “pro-vaccine” people is the demand for newborns and infants to receive the massive doses (any really) of vaccines now being pushed and even mandated. A vaccine ONLY “works” when it can stimulate the immune system to produce antibodies. Newborns, and infants up to as much as a year old, do not HAVE an immune system strong enough to perform that function. This is one reason breast feeding for the first year is so important, since that milk is filled with the antibodies the mother’s system produces.
Unfortunately, a great many people of all ages no longer have a strong immune system, and so they have a poor or even negative response to attempts to stimulate it. That’s one reason more and more vaccines are causing worse problems. And it is one reason why infections of all kind have become such a serious matter. In spite of all the hype, fads and interest in health, most Americans have a far less healthy immune system than they did a hundred years ago. And no drugs or vaccine will ever fix that.
This may interest you. It rather eliminates the “herd immunity” idea rather well. I always knew that… I spent 30 years in nursing, exposed to every kind of infection around then, and never was affected by any of them. I don’t get infections, heal incredibly fast from injury, and have NEVER had the “flu.” I’ve also had very few antibiotics, and only three immunizations, including tetanus – starting after I began going to school. I have always believed there was a definite connection.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/vaccine-mccarthyism-what-if-the-vaccine-paradigm-itself-is-deliberately-flawed/5427768
Dr. Gary Null and Richard Gale at Global Research – it became clear in
2014, with many studies and the release of documents by Dr. William
Thompson, a CDC whistleblower, that vaccines are not the magic bullet
many people believe them to be. They may actually be a major cause of
the diseases they claim to eradicate, and more.
We are required to get a flu shot where I work, wear a mask (which, at best, might stop larger particles, if you’re running a sander), or get fired. The only time in my life I’ve ever had even vaguely flu like symptoms was right after getting the shot..and they guessed the wrong strain, making it nearly, if not completely, useless. I’m, as you say, agnostic on vaccines, but I like to pick and choose which ones.
This is as much a comment about global warming as it is about vaccines:
Most of us understand the perils and the idiocy of mixing politics and religion. Over the centuries, this has given us many wars and piles of dead people!
I submit that mixing politics and science is just as idiotic, and potentially equally harmful.
Lots of silly (destructive) and ineffective measures in lots of work places. The mandatory vaccinations are certainly one of them.
The thing to realize is that it is often worse than ineffective, whatever the bug. I watched hospital acquired infections RISE year by year after the whole “universal precautions” thing was instituted. Wonder why? Too many health professionals believed that the disinfectants, gloves, gowns, etc. meant they didn’t really need to wash their hands anymore…. or stay home when they were sick.
Too many people still think that a vaccination or forty means they don’t need to do much else to protect their children or themselves from infection. Just as the clorox wipe has replaced real housecleaning, and the bacteria hysteria has replaced sensible and effective food preparation.
It’s a form of insanity, of course. And, as you say, individual choice is essential.
With the controversy over the MMR jab most governments and health care providers refused to give single inoculations. Apparently it would be far too complicated. Except the Japanese. Their medical establishment expressed doubts about both the safety and effectiveness of the MMR. So the government suspended the program and went to single inoculations. Reasoning that while there may not be a risk it could not be ruled out and until investigated it would be better for children to have singles rather than none at all. What a sensible approach to a delicate problem. They have now reverted to using the MMR but it is a considerably different formula to the old the version.
As Mama Liberty points out above their is to much dependence on trendy cleaning products when a good dose of bleach would be far more effective.
“not so long ago – within the lifetimes of a lot of us – measles was considered both epidemic and no threat at all, just a normal part of childhood to be gotten over with”
Indeed, but that view was ignorant. During that bygone period literally hundreds of thousands of people died from the measles and untold numbers of miscarriages and babies born with birth defects. I am 71 and had the measles at 7 years old so it would be easy for me to laugh it off as a childhood disease but it is so much more. We have radio, TV and the internet and anyone can find that measles is a serious disease and the vaccine saves a LOT of lives.
Vaccines are the single biggest thing in the 20th century. Bigger than all the wars, bigger than antibiotics. Vaccines have literally saved billions of lives. Nothing had a bigger effect on the world. But they are a victim of their own success. Many childhood diseases no longer kill half of the children before age 18 and people have become complacent and “ignorant”. Not “ignorant” as an insult but “ignorant” as in they do not know the facts. You can ignore the facts but you cannot ignore the results of ignoring the facts. If the anti-vax people have their way we will once again get to watch our children die from diseases of childhood.
By the way vaccinations (most of them) have been the law for half a century. There is no state and no place in this country where vaccines are not required. There are places where exemptions are a little easier to get but they are “required” for everyone else. In my state School Exclusion Day is Feb. 18. After that date if yoru child doesn’t have the required vaccinations they cannot attend public school. So for everyone who thinks the government has suddenly decided to force their will on us they are wrong. The decision was made long ago that children must have certain vaccines.
By the way the name “Luditte” isn’t “bad” anymore than being called a Southerner or a redneck is “bad”. It is merely a descriptive name for people who oppose new ideas just because they are “new ideas”.
I don’t necessarily object to vaccinations in principal; they have their place. My biggest objection is assaulting 2 month-old infant’s immune system with a crap load of cooked infectious agents. And, I also, don’t believe in purposely exposing any child to another child who is infected with measles/mumps/chicken pox just to name a few. But, then again, I am certifiably odd.
“not so long ago – within the lifetimes of a lot of us –”
…a lot of very dumb things were believed. Perhaps more than today (although I do not at all believe we have reached Peak Derp.)
I’m sorry, but born 1950, experiencing the relief my parents felt with the Salk vaccine, I am happy to urge all to take advantage of vaccines. I grew up with older relatives suffering with polio. I had measles,(both kinds) mumps, scarlet fever, chicken pox before 12 yrs. old. My children have not suffered any of these……..Thank GOD!!! Take your chances either way. My guess is that over time vaccinated will be better off. You care about your children? Read a little history for f”@ks sake.
“My biggest objection is assaulting 2 month-old infant’s immune system with a crap load of cooked infectious agents.”
There are a million or so doctors and tens of thousands of scientists working with vaccine technology. Do you really believe they are all conspiring to harm your child? The timing of vaccines for children is a compromise. They want to quickly protect the child without putting the child at risk. They have determined the best schedule for vaccinations to fill those needs. Parents can delay and even spread out vaccinations without doctors or officials raising an eyebrow. Wait a few extra months, no one cares. Wait a few extra years and you are putting your child at risk. But how do you decide? The obvious way is to listen to the experts, the doctors and scientists. Not Naturalnews.com or other questionable sites. I have 4 children, 12 grandchildren and 4 great grandchildren. I understand the concern and even fear that these issues can generate. But it comes down to who do you trust. Trust the million or so doctors that have spent 5-10 years in specialized education plus years of practice and experience and have dedicated their lives to helping people avoid illness and/or cure them of illnesses or trust the unemployed high school dropout blogger in his parents basement that invents terms like “cooked infectious agents” for the single purpose of scaring you. Who are you going to trust?.
I love it when folks abandon their alleged core values just because this time things are in their favor. That’s one of the reasons I suspect conservatives as much (well, almost) as liberals. I’m libertarian; leave me the hell alone & everything’s shiny.
There seems to be an enormous absense of evidence about the safety and effectiveness of vaccines in general.
I’ve read quite a bit of research on possible links between vaccination and brain damage in children. Most of it looked bogus, but there have been some good papers which show correlation and in-vitro evidence that mercury preservatives in vaccines can and may be causing problems. That’s enough to justify shying away from vaccines preserved with thimerosal.
Other papers have looked at the possibliity that serious developmental problems, such as autism, might be caused by serious assults on the immune system, such as multiple early vaccination. This work looks weaker so far than the evidence against the thimerosal. On the other hand, where is the evidence for the safety of the vaccines?
The research I have seen touting vaccine safety seem to be based on adminstrative records. A vaccination reaction is only reported as caused by vaccination if the doctor, who has been told in medical school and throughout his career that vaccines are safe and effective, recognizes it and reports it as such. There is a fund set up to compensate those who are harmed by vaccinations. Judging by the experiences I have observed others have, collecting from that fund, and being counted as a vaccination injury, is much rarer than having a serious reaction to a vaccine.
In short, the administrative records are almost surely biased by under-reporting. The safety of the vaccines may still be good, but it probably isn’t as good as we are lead to believe.
The fact that congress passed a special law absolving vaccine manufacturers of all responsibility for any harm they do indicates that someone with deep pockets was afraid that the vaccines aren’t as safe as all that.
Some vaccines are worth the risk. Some aren’t. You have to make that decision for yourself, and for your children. If you want to be protected, get the vaccine. Don’t expect others to take the risk for you.
It all seems pretty simple to me.
“congress passed a special law absolving vaccine manufacturers”. They did this because the trial lawyers were putting them out of business. No U.S. owned pharmeceutical company was willing to produce vaccines and we had to buy them from an English company who was rationing them.
There is a cabal between some of these studies you cite and trail lawyers. Some of the authors of these anti-vax studies in fact were paid hundreds of thousands of dollars by trial lawyers to put out their propaganda. The trail lawyers then take a class action lawsuit to a state like Mississippi where there are a lot of ignorant people for the jury pool and state laws that make the burden of proof easier to meet. They win their case and take literally billions. It is a scam and most of the antivax info out there is part of that scam.
Thimerosal is a good examle of that scam. There have been good studies which have totally disproved the claim that thimerosal causes autism or any health problems. The author of the study who got this all started was proved to have taken in excess of $600,000 from trial lawyers for the effort on their behalf. He was a doctor who because of the extent of his fraud lost his license to practice medicine. So much for the whole thimerosal thingy.
Very few people have any serious reactions to vaccinations. Typically what is seen in children is a small red spot at the point of vaccination and sometimes a slight temperature for a few hours. There are people who because of their own physiology cannot safely endure any kind of shot including life saving efforts when they are admitted to hospitals after an accident. They have reactions to needles and any invasive technique and sometimes even die from these. This kind of thing occurs in about 1 in a million humans. It is a individual problem and not a problem of the vaccine. Unfortunetly if someone like this is undiagnosed receives a vaccination they may well have a reaction to it. This is blamed on the vaccine but it is nt the fault of the vaccine.
Another more common problem that is attributed to vaccines are those natural occurrences such as SIDS or epilepsy etc. When a child gets one of these problems it inevitably follows a vaccination. If you notice the vaccination schedule begins at two months and continues to after age 6. So inevitably anything that happens to the child after age 2 months also happens after a vaccination. It could be the next day, the next month or six months after a vaccination. Some parents make the connection that it was the vacccine that caused a health problem in their child. Odly they don’t think it was anything they did or any of the many other things children are subject to. Why is that? Because the anti-vaxers are constantly telling us that vaccines cause problems. Statistically people of all ages and all backgrounds get sick, have sudden onset of serious problems and even die literally all the time. What causes this? If you are an anti-vaxer it is vaccines. If you are a vegan it is animal products. If you are a paleo dieter it is carbs. If you are religious then god did it. The truth is life is a fatal condition. We are all in the process of dying. I am a male age 71 and I am probably prime to die from a heart attack any day now. That is life. Not big pharma conspiring against me, not my doctors giving me bad advice and certainly not a lack of herbs and supplements. But depending on your belief you will have an answer that supports your biases.
All I know is that I have health issues that say I now need to go back and get an MMR vac. I feel like shit most days as it is and that’s almost sure to make me feel like dying shit for a few days at least.
I wanna thank the anti-vax crowd for letting their typhoid marry-esque little snot hurricanes spread respiratory death all over fucking Disneyland and then on to the world……groovy.
I agree with ML about the concept of slamming babies with bugs. I think the vaccines are a good thing, but there is likely a flaw or two in the thinking that such tiny babies should be hit like that. I don’t really know, above my pay grade and always will be.
That, however does not in any way, in my mind, support the anti-vax crowd, especially nitwits like Jenny McCarthy who wants to blame her kids autism on vaccines when it was more likely HER incessant and copious hard narcotic use that fucker her ability to product non-defective spawn. Not that her inner skull genetics were any help to begin with, but enough speed is bound to jack your DNA.