My most recent post (“Dear parents, you are being lied to”) has sparked a very lively discussion. I encourage you to continue to share your thoughts on it, but I also want to follow up by asking for your reactions to one comment that I found particularly interesting. (I’ve edited it a bit for brevity)
As a pediatrician who’s spent extensive time working in the US and overseas and has seen children die from EVERY disease (except small pox) for which there is a vaccine I am appalled at the lack of education by the general public on the vaccine issue. This is my rant: I had two unvaccinated children in the US die from whooping cough, one from tetanus, and 2 from meningitis in the past few years. Perhaps this reflects our country’s generally poor understanding of math and science in general. A recent large study in the US showed that no matter how scientists try to educate US parents about disease and disease prevention, whether it is vaccines or hand washing, parents simply cannot follow the logic.
It’s devastating to see children die from preventable disease and despicable that it is happening here. I would like to know why those whose children end up in the PICU with tetanus or whooping cough now trust us to save the life of their child? Why do you run to a doctor when you are terrified your child has tetanus after refusing to vaccinate? Why am I now competent to save your child’s life when they have meningitis or epiglottis, but I wasn’t competent enough to keep them from getting sick? If there was no medical help for your unvaccinated child if they acquired a vaccine preventable illness would you think about vaccinating? If you’re not willing to run to your anti-vaccine friend, treat your child with advice from non-scientific sites on the internet, go to your chiropractor, or your holistic healer with your dying child perhaps you shouldn’t be taking their advice about vaccines. —Anonymous
To those of you who simply don’t trust the medical community’s use of vaccines, I am curious what you make of this physician’s point. Given your reservations about vaccines, do you trust an MD to treat yourself or your children for any medical issues at all? If so, why do you trust his/her education and experience on some points but not others?
I invite anyone, pro- or anti-vax, to share your thoughts on this. Please respect each other by following the commenting policies (and feel free to alert me if I miss a comment in violation of them).
Violent metaphors 
This was well said. I mean you either trust medical research or you don’t, because the same methodology is used throughout.
Not sure how to blog etc.. However, I had a brother who developed chickenpox as a child. We were 5 children and he was the youngest. I remember him screaming in his crib at 3 months old. He was covered with weeping wounds. The other 4 children including me had chicken pox at the time. We took turns rocking the bassinet in the living room in order to try and calm him. He had a sheet draped over bassinet because nothing could touch his skin. He did recover. At about 8 months of age it became apparent he was very different.
He was profoundly retarded due the the brain fever and totally deaf.
He was not able to be toilet trained and would need to be locked in a room at night as he would run outdoors even in the winter. In the morning any sharp object that he could find was used to scratch the walls, bed, furniture. In addition he would paint the room nightly with feces. Every morning my mother would have to wash all the walls and floor in the room. He was able to open his bedroom window at 7 and jumped out.
At age 7 he had to be placed in an asylum ( that is what it was called back then).
We would visit as a family very often and take him home when we could. He had to wear a helmet on his head to prevent him from banging his head and harming himself. In addition he contracted hepatitis B while in the asylum.
By the late 70’s children like him were transferred to group homes where they could receive more proper care. He developed epilepsy and had frequent seizures that resulted in him being wheel chair bound.
My parents worried constantly about his care should they die. My mother participated on every committee and board for the mentally retarded children’s association.
Their worry was put to rest when at age 40 he died during a grand male seizure.
40 years was a very long time to see my brother suffer. Although in my mind he was a “window to our souls”, I always wonder what he could have been.
Your personal story of what happened to your brother affected me profoundly. The young & innocent can not decide & choose for themselves to be vaccinated or not which is why I want to rip my hair out when parents choose for their babies NOT to vaccinate. Were you guys not vaccinated or was the chicken pox vaccine even available then? But it is now so children like your brother need not suffer like he did. I am so sorry… I cried thinking about how much a 3 month old baby must have suffered. Thank you for sharing. ~ Jamie
Sounds to me like autism….said with respect…I obviously don’t know anything about your brother nor his suffering. So sorry for what you all went through.
Wow that “rebuttal” was full of useless rhetoric. Thanks for the blog post.
Sorry – that reply was meant for “Jon”
Charles, I completely agree. You either trust and give the same weight to ALL medical, peer-reviewed research or you are a hypocrite. With that said, we cannot just dismiss the multitude of Peer Reviewed scientific studies that have shown potential health concerns with vaccines. In my opinion, after extensive research, the concern should be mainly with the high concentrations of intramuscular injections of toxic metals, specifically aluminum (which is excreted differently than the natural aluminum that is ingested through the environment and food). To make my argument I am quoting only, what I believe, are peer-reviewed studies and accepted scientific facts (please correct me if I am wrong)
I should note that I recently had a child and that is why I did extensive research on the issue. My wife and I reluctantly decided to do a delayed vaccination schedule due to the pressure from our doctor, which I believe I am going to regret for life, as we have already started to see a weakened immune system in her. (Thankfully, we currently see NO autism signs) But that is neither here nor there so on to the research…
First off, I think It is important to establish a few basic facts.
1) Excess aluminum is toxic, especially to the brain. According to MedScape: “aluminum accumulation in tissues and organs results in their dysfunction and toxicity.” And, “If a significant load exceeds the body’s excretory capacity, the excess is deposited in various tissues, including bone, brain, liver, heart, spleen, and muscle. This accumulation causes morbidity and mortality through various mechanisms.” http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/165315-overview
2) Aluminum loads in vaccines appear to be very high for an infant. Following is a list of CDC recommended vaccines and their aluminum content.
• HepB (Hepatitis B) = 250 mcg (Engerix or Recombivax)
• DTaP (diptheria, tetanus and acellular pertussis) = ranges from 170 mcg (Tripedia), 330 mcg (Daptacel), 625 (Infarix)
• HiB (Haemophilus influenzae B.) = 225 mcg (PedvaxHIB)
• PCV (Pneumococcal) = 125 mcg (Prevnar-13)
• Hep A (Hepatitis A) = 250 mcg (HAVRIX and VAQTA)
• COMVAX (Hib + HepB) = 225 mcg
• Pediatrix (DTaP + HepB + IPV) = 850 mcg
• Pentacel (DTaP + IPV + Hib) = 330 mcg (note: the package insert says it has 1500 mcg of aluminum phosphate, which is equivalent to 330 mcg of elemental aluminum)
According to the FDA, the maximum allowance for premature neonates is 4/5 mcg/kg of weight. I understand that is for premature babies, but I have yet to find a level for full term infants which is a little disconcerting.
On to the peer-reviewed studies:
Here are just a few of the numerous examples.
The first one is this study which concludes: “Avoidance of Al (aluminum) exposure, when practical, seems prudent.” http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11130287
The next one states that “It is likely that aluminium is transported to the brain by the iron-binding protein transferrin and enters the brain via specific transferrin receptors.” http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1608913
And this one, which concludes that “By satisfying eight of the Hill’s criteria for establishing causality applicable to our study (Table 9), we show that Al-adjuvanted vaccines may be a significant etiological factor in the rising prevalence of ASD
in the Western world.” http://omsj.org/reports/tomljenovic%202011.pdf
Here is another study which states that: “Although individuals probably have a genetic predisposition to develop autism, researchers suspect that one or more environmental triggers are also needed. One of those triggers might be the battery of vaccinations that young children receive.” The abstract goes on to state that, “The higher the proportion of children receiving recommended vaccinations, the higher was the prevalence of AUT or SLI. A 1% increase in vaccination was associated with an additional 680 children having AUT or SLI.” http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21623535
And a few more…
Aluminum overload increases oxidative stress in four functional brain areas of neonatal rats. http://journal.livingfood.us/2011/10/12/new-study-neurotoxicity-of-aluminum-in-vaccines/
“The authors conclude that the persistence of aluminum hydroxide at the site of intramuscular injection is a novel finding which has an exact significance that remains to be established fully.” http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14753387
Mechanisms of aluminum adjuvant toxicity and autoimmunity in pediatric populations. http://lup.sagepub.com/content/21/2/223.short
Finally I think it is important to analyze the current statistics regarding child health. I believe 1 in 68 kids now have autisim (with boys being much more likely to suffer from ASD than girls). Nearly 1 in 2 children suffer from some form of chronic illness. 21% are developmentally disabled and our world infant mortality ranking has went from the 3rd best to the 46th, according to the 2011 World Bank Report . These widespread issues would lead you to believe that something that we are doing, on a near universal level, is causing these problems. Obviously, vaccines are only one potential cause of these issues, but a potential cause that cannot just be outright dismissed, in my opinion.
http://stanmed.stanford.edu/2013fall/article2.html
http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/early/2011/05/19/peds.2010-2989.abstract
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1876285910002500
In addition to the above, there are plenty of more studies that call in to question vaccine safety.
The point of this is not to definitively say that vaccines cause autism (or any other condition), but it is to make the point that the science on this issue is far from being conclusive. I would say my main concern is the lack of science regarding intramuscular injections, aluminum excretion and infants. There does not seem to have been proper studies on this issue as vaccines have generally been accepted by the CDC as non-toxic. For example, according to a 2002 FDA/CDC discussion, “Historically, the non-clinical safety assessment for preventive vaccines has often not included toxicity studies in animal models. This is because vaccines have not been viewed as inherently toxic, and vaccines are generally administered in limited dosages over months or even years.” http://www.fda.gov/downloads/BiologicsBloodVaccines/NewsEvents/WorkshopsMeetingsConferences/TranscriptsMinutes/UCM054459.pdf
So I guess my question is, who is really being lied to?
Matthew, you don’t understand the magnitude of the problem. Well, actually, you don’t understand magnitude or dosage, so your science is pretty shaky all around. Breast milk has about 40 mcg of Al per liter, infant formula 225 mcg/L, and soy formula around 400 mcg/L. See http://www.chop.edu/service/vaccine-education-center/vaccine-safety/vaccine-ingredients/aluminum.html I estimate that babies get at least 68,000 mcg Al per year from formula alone, not even counting solid foods, compared to about 25,000 mcg per lifetime from all vaccines, including flu shots and other adult shots. (1,000 mcg = 1 milligram) Your basic math, like emily’s to whom I responded similarly below, is way off. What else are you wrong about?
Jerry, I would advise you to re-read my argument. I am arguing that ingesting aluminum through food is completely different than the intramuscular administration of aluminum via vaccines (Which it is). Aluminum excretion through food is much more efficient than excretion through injection. Next.
To add to that Jerry, Science recognizes that “While the body is able to excrete aluminum in its natural form, the element, like mercury, is toxic to all lifeforms when concentrated in their tissues.”
I patiently await your response.
My response, Matthew, is that your sources are making up the idea that “Aluminum excretion through food is much more efficient than excretion through injection.” It is not based on science or medicine. Aluminum may not be totally absorbed from food, but neither is everything in food, such as dietary iron or calcium. Once in the system, it does not matter if the source is dietary or injected, the ions move through extracellular fluid (like lymph) then through blood circulate to the kidneys where the Al is excreted. Let’s say that I play along with the anti-vax idea, then how much different are the two routes? Has anyone quantitated the difference in absorption and or excretion? Peer reviewed scientific journals and reputable medical sources, please, not an anti-vax blog.
As far as the second anti-vax talking point (not fact), dosage matters. Some mercury is tolerated, or we’d all go mad and die from our first bite of fish. Some aluminum is tolerated, or we’d all die from our first drop of breast milk, our first bite of solid food, or our first antacid tablet (really huge Al dose there!, 5x all lifetime vaccines). Once you allow that reality to seep in, once you have to admit that some amount of aluminum is not immediately toxic, once you have to admit that the continuing Al dosage in food and breast milk is much much higher than the total amount from vaccines, then what is left of your argument? By the way, since not all vaccines contain aluminum adjuvants, my estimate for the Al vaccine content is too high.
p.s. The key word, which you overlook to your detriment, is “concentrated”. A normally functioning kidney can not tell the difference between aluminum ions from an injection versus from food. Kidneys will not allow the Al concentration to build up to toxic levels for any reasonable intake.
I left out a link supporting aluminum adjuvant safety. http://www.immunizationinfo.org/issues/vaccine-components/aluminum-adjuvants-vaccines
Dr. Raff,
Do you have an opinion on the above mentioned Medical studies? Any thoughts are welcomed and appreciated. I should close by saying I am in no way “anti-vaccine”. I just became concerned, over the course of my research, with the peer-reviewed studies that raised some questions regarding the safety of vaccines. Honestly, I went in to the research with the thought that I would just confirm the pro-vaccine arguments and move on. Unfortunately, that is not what I found. I think we all should be skeptical when there is trillions of dollars involved, as I believe history will show that everyone has a price. Doctors included: http://projects.propublica.org/docdollars/
I didn’t see any link in your original post, but I’d also like to hear Dr. Raff’s opinion on the recent University of Pittsburgh study that tested the typical vaccine schedule on a group of infant monkeys with another group operating as the control group. The testing included the MMR vaccine as well as vaccines containing Thimerosal. The study found abnormal brain changes in the vaccinated population including an abnormal increase in opioid binding activity in the amygdala. If it’s not the vaccines themselves then I’d like to know what else could be causing these. I’m not a scientist myself, but as far as I’m aware the UP has a good reputation.
Thank you for those of you that post look up peer reviewed sources. Having a degree in Holistic Health & Wellness, I hesitate to agree with the pro-vaccination populace. I wanted to write a thorough explanation but Matthew did such a great job, I figured it would only get redundant. But I did decide to look up a few sites for others to take a quick gander at, also written by pediatricians and experts.
Aluminum Toxicity
http://www.askdrsears.com/topics/health-concerns/vaccines/vaccine-faqs
Vaccine Ingredients
http://vaccines.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID=005206
European Vaccine Schedule by Country
http://www.euvac.net/graphics/euvac/vaccination/germany.html
WHO Evaluations on Vaccines’ clinical studies (Read # 4)
Click to access nonclinical_evaluation_vaccines_nov_2003.pdf
Misty Rains,
In such a polemical discussion, any question can sound accusatory.
I can only hope you will believe that I am simply asking because I don’t know the answers.
What goes into a degree in Holistic Health & Wellness? What core courses are required? What are some of the electives? What are some of the universities offering the degree? You certainly don’t need to say where you got yours, but it would be helpful to my understanding if you could point out a few of the universities that do offer that degree, so I can look at their curriculum to better understand what goes into that degree.
When I was young, my father would look at some of the degrees offered at my school and ask, “What the hell is that?” When I would tell him, he’d think for a moment and then shrug and say, “Oh, I guess that makes sense. I just never heard of it.”
That’s all I’m looking to do.
This was a perfect response from a medical professional. As a pharmacy student who is certified to immunize against these diseases we’re taught the risks and how we should encourage patients to head this advice. It always made me curious what the parents who refused to vaccine would do in the event that their child indeed come down with these diseases.
The risks of these diseases and to heed this advice*. Sorry autocorrect fail.
Brandtastic Please read the following rebuttal to this article. It has links so that you may learn the other side if you wish to know the truth.http://www.livingwhole.org/dear-parents-are-you-being-lied-to/
You’ve now dropped five links to this site, without substantive comment. I’m going to add the same comment beneath each, but please stop spamming with it.
The author complains that Jennifer’s original article says that parents are being lied to, but then proceeds to lie to parents. I’ve outlined some very specific factual problems with that piece. They include, but are not limited to:
– The vaccine court has never ruled that there is a causative connection between vaccines and autism; it has ruled the exact opposite.
– There are not “countless court cases” confirming such a link; the autism omnibus proceedings have been decided and the court ruled the other way (despite her insinuation to the contrary).
– There are no vaccine inserts confirming such a link.
She is also seriously misleading her readers regarding aluminum adjuvants as well as some other issues.
I don’t use the word “lie” lightly, but frankly the author of that piece must know that her statements are not true. She has been actively suppressing comments on her own blog identifying specific falsehoods or with information that challenges her insinuations, without correcting her piece or engaging with critics. If she refuses to acknowledge, much less correct, her egregious factual problems then I think it’s fair to say she is actually lying to parents.
I read your rebuttal and I am not impressed. I’ve studied the immune system and I think for myself. You’re just pandering to scared parents. Parents who are now more scared of autism than polio. Mainly because we took care of polio, albeit there was a cost.
And your use of the word “truth” is kind of funny. But then again, truth is a funny thing.
Wow. That “rebuttal” was full of useless rhetoric and no substance. Thanks.
I hope my kids never get any dread disease, but my son became Autistic After the MMR shot. 12 hours after, so despite your studies, I am a REAL person, with A Real son, who was fine until that day. He started shaking his head, severely, staring at the lights, and he stopped talking. Being flippant about this is un Godly.
No one is mocking your son’s disease or your family’s suffering, but yours is one story. The millions of people all over the world who have had their vaccinations and are not autistic tells a better story. I know a child diagnosed at 2 years old whose parents refused all vaccinations from the time he was born because they were afraid. Explain that. You can’t and right now neither can anyone else. But the CDC, the WHO, UNICEF, and the FDA all back the science showing vaccines ARE NOT the cause of autism. I assume you take OTC and/or prescription drugs approved by the FDA, so you trust them there. UNICEF would not have reputation it does if it was poisoning children all over the third world. The CDC and the WHO have some of the world’s best doctors and researchers working for them. If those doctors believed their organizations were perpetuating a lie don’t you think they’d speak up and publish the proof. Hope is knowing that there are things we don’t know and that those things may have the power to change our lives for the better. In the meantime, look at research being done on autism and the Y chromosome (looking at why more males than females are autistic) and research on uterus condition at time of conception (uteruses are apparently like soils that can be abundant in some things and depleted in others affecting the crops they grow). These two lines of thought may get all of us closer to unlocking the mystery behind autism.
Your son was autistic before. You just noted the symptoms that day because you were actively looking for them after the vaccination due to paranoia.
I do not mean any disrespect, but 12 hours after? I’m trying to connect the pathological dots to see how that is possible. As an educator, I would hope that you base your conclusion on better research and understanding of the condition. I have never heard of “spontaneous” ASD. It is something that is detected through observation of delayed motor, speech, cognitive and other skills when compared to age-appropriate peers. That’s how a diagnosis is made. Please see DSM IV or V.
The same thing we would do if our vaccinated children came down with all these chronic diseases linked to vaccination. Treat them, duh
Both your blog post and that of the pediatrician here are so very true. Vaccinations are one of the MOST significant advances in public health of the 20th and 21st century. It is always such a contradiction to me as a pediatrician that parents look to their doctors to cure everything (include many illnesses that need to resolve on their own) don’t listen to their doctors’ advice regarding immunizations. They prefer (and seem to find) all of the anti-vaccine information on the Internet. As an older doctor, I saw many of the diseases that are now vaccine preventable kill infants and children. When each new vaccine was created, I would always remember the patient who died of that specific disease. No vaccine is 100% effective but if we promote vaccine rates of close to 100%, there will be many fewer unprotected individuals. If parents want to cherish, nurture and protect their children, vaccinating a child should be a priority. As the Columbus (Ohio) Public Health called their immunization campaign, Project LOVE, Love our Kids, Vaccinate Early.
Well JoAnn Royyans, MD Please read the rebuttal http://www.livingwhole.org/dear-parents-are-you-being-lied-to/
You’ve now dropped five links to this site, without substantive comment. I’m going to add the same comment beneath each, but please stop spamming with it.
The author complains that Jennifer’s original article says that parents are being lied to, but then proceeds to lie to parents. I’ve outlined some very specific factual problems with that piece. They include, but are not limited to:
– The vaccine court has never ruled that there is a causative connection between vaccines and autism; it has ruled the exact opposite.
– There are not “countless court cases” confirming such a link; the autism omnibus proceedings have been decided and the court ruled the other way (despite her insinuation to the contrary).
– There are no vaccine inserts confirming such a link.
She is also seriously misleading her readers regarding aluminum adjuvants as well as some other issues.
I don’t use the word “lie” lightly, but frankly the author of that piece must know that her statements are not true. She has been actively suppressing comments on her own blog identifying specific falsehoods or with information that challenges her insinuations, without correcting her piece or engaging with critics. If she refuses to acknowledge, much less correct, her egregious factual problems then I think it’s fair to say she is actually lying to parents.
Come on Colin, you are being very misleading.
Regardless of whether or not the court ruled there was a “causative connection between vaccines and autism” the fact remains that the Vaccine court paid out millions of dollars in compensation to victims. Not sure why they would pay out so much money if the facts were in their favor.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-kirby/post2468343_b_2468343.html#
In addition, since the vaccine court was established in 1989, it has awarded over 2 BILLION dollars in compensation to victims. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/22/AR2011022206008.html
And lastly, there IS a vaccine insert that addresses such a link. It is in the Tripedia DTaP vaccine. The insert states: “Adverse events reported during post-approval use of Tripedia vaccine include idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura, SIDS,
anaphylactic reaction, cellulitis, AUTISM (emphasis added), convulsion/grand mal convulsion, encephalopathy, hypotonia, neuropathy, somnolence
and apnea. Events were included in this list because of the seriousness or frequency of reporting.” http://www.fda.gov/downloads/BiologicsBloodVaccines/Vaccines/ApprovedProducts/UCM101580.pdf
Hi Matthew,
I think it’s a little ironic that you say I’m being misleading. When you say that the court has awarded millions to kids with autism, I’ll assume that’s 100% true. But the court has presumably also made awards to kids with cleft palates. Do vaccines cause cleft palates? The court didn’t award compensation for autism caused by vaccines–if it did, there would be a record anti-vaxers could cite, instead of the sly insinuations going on. When the court was asked to rule on the question of whether vaccines cause autism, anti-vaxers, even with all their experts and facts lined up in a row, could not persuade the court that the “facts were in their favor.” The omnibus proceedings were resolved in the other direction.
And yes, the court has awarded about $2.5 billion since it was founded. That’s over 25+ years. What’s surprising about that number is how *small* it is. In a nation of 300+ million people, cumulative damages add up very, very fast. Automobile accidents alone cost more than one hundred times as much in a single year as vaccine injuries in over twenty years. That despite the fact that over 10 million vaccines are given each year. Just dropping the “2 BILLION” figure and hoping it inspires fear and uncertainty is exactly the kind of manipulative dishonesty we’re talking about. Why not give the rest of the context, that fewer than a thousand people file for compensation each year even though the government pays for their lawyers even if they lose? A product that’s used over 10 million times a year and generates less than a thousand claims for compensation isn’t just safe, it’s remarkably safe.
Your last paragraph is an unsupported assertion. You say that there is a vaccine insert that “addresses such a link,” presumably meaning a causative link. But the insert language you cite doesn’t address causation at all. It says that adverse events that were reported include autism.
The VAERS reporting system is very simple and upfront about causation: “Please report all significant adverse events that occur after vaccination of adults and children, even if you are not sure whether the vaccine caused the adverse event.” The reports don’t require, and can’t be considered, evidence of causation–only that an adverse event happened sometime around the time a vaccine was given.
A VAERS report isn’t even evidence that the reporter thinks the vaccine caused the adverse event, so a vaccine insert acknowledging reports were filed certainly isn’t admitting a causative link.
People leaving the blog Jon linked to walk away with a lot of misconceptions. I think it says a lot about that blogger than she seems to intend that result; she recently added a link to support her false claim that the vaccine court has “ruled” that evidence of a vaccine-autism link exists, except the document she cited says nothing of the kind. It’s a ruling that makes no findings of fact whatsover, since the HHS conceded that the vaccine cause encephalitis (which is not autism).
Colin,
Parse words all you want, the insert link is right there for anyone to check out themselves.
Also, I find a major problem with the VAERS system. I believe I once read that VAERS will accept adverse reaction reports up until 3 years after the shot. I believe autism is usually clinically diagnosed between the age of 3-4 (although earlier detection is now becoming more common), which means many potential reports are timed out. Not to mention it is estimated that only 1-10% of adverse reactions are reported to them, so I would argue VAERS is not an accurate depiction of adverse reactions. (Again, please correct me if I am wrong)
With that said, if 100% of adverse reactions made it the Vaccine Court obviously that 2.5 billion would be much much larger. Unfortunately, they don’t.
Just to be clear, it’s not “parsing words” like we’re playing a game with grammar. It’s simple logic:
A. VAERS reports don’t establish, and are not meant to show, causation.
B. Therefore, when an insert says that autism has been reported in VAERS, it does not admit (or even “address”) causation.
C. Therefore, it is mistaken at best and deceitful at worst when anti-vaxers falsely claim that the insert cops to causation.
Given your dubious track record in even these few posts, I’m not terribly interested in what you “believe you once read.” Cite it, please.
You may be a doctor, but I am a parent of a child who was typically functioning, until 12 hours after the MMR Shot. He started shaking his head, staring at the ceiling and he ceased speaking. THis is a REAL story that REALLY occurred, so despite the wonderful things some vaccines have done, they have also very seriously harmed MANY people. Our lives have FOREVER changed since that day. Being called a LIAR on top of all that we have suffered is astounding and severely disappointing.
Your child was autistic before the shot. You just noticed after because you were actively looking for symptoms afterwards thanks to the antivax movement.
If your not a Doctor who knows that some children don’t have the enzym to break down the shelf stabilizer in the vaccine like toxic mercury an there is no test out as yet to find out which child does not have that protective enzyme . Than you need to learn all you can about it before before you promote vaccines.
Both of your points were addressed in the previous blog post. Most vaccines no longer contain any thimerosal (mercury compound). Dr. Raff is a geneticist, so telling her she needs to learn more about it is condescending. Nearly all of the science misinformation and misunderstanding comes from the anti-vaccine side, and that ‘nearly all’ is being charitable. (You spelled “enzyme” wrong, btw.)
Jerry,
Your subtle ad-hominem attacks are very telling and a typical response from those who do not wish to argue the point at hand. I personally am very skeptical of your purpose here. Not to mention I provided you multiple peer-reviewed studies above that the “anti-vaccine” side has seen. So are you saying peer-reviewed studies are “misinformation and misunderstanding”, or are you just ignoring them because they don’t fit your preconceived thoughts on vaccines. Seems like a classic case of cognitive dissonance, Jerry.
No, I replied directly to Anonymous’ main point here and to you above. Anonymous is claiming that mercury causes autism or some other unnamed harm via a lack of mercury clearing enzyme. No citation provided, and none I could find. No suggestion of the rate of incidence, just hand-waving. As for you, you are misinterpreting the peer reviewed studies on aluminum you cited (see above), and believing the unscientific anti-vax blogs where that claim is found.
Reblogged this on Brandtastic's daily ramblings and commented:
This couldn’t have been said better.
This is not just a science thing, but a life thing: YOU are responsible for vetting the sources. If a source has ‘always been reliable’ it can still fail to be so in the future so CHECK the information. One point not addressed, and important in my view, is the Religious component. It is hard to address ‘beliefs’ in a scientific fashion, and this can impact the ‘herd immunity’ discussed in the OP.
It’s a very interesting issue. I’ve worked with some organ donation professionals, and they say that in fact virtually no organized religions oppose organ donation in practice. I think the same thing is probably true of vaccinations–with a few notable exceptions, virtually no large denominations oppose it. The use of religious exemptions may be just an easy way to refer to conscience exemptions, and an attempt to make such decisions more credible and unassailable.
Please read the rebuttal to this article http://www.livingwhole.org/dear-parents-are-you-being-lied-to/
You’ve now dropped five links to this site, without substantive comment. I’m going to add the same comment beneath each, but please stop spamming with it.
The author complains that Jennifer’s original article says that parents are being lied to, but then proceeds to lie to parents. I’ve outlined some very specific factual problems with that piece. They include, but are not limited to:
– The vaccine court has never ruled that there is a causative connection between vaccines and autism; it has ruled the exact opposite.
– There are not “countless court cases” confirming such a link; the autism omnibus proceedings have been decided and the court ruled the other way (despite her insinuation to the contrary).
– There are no vaccine inserts confirming such a link.
She is also seriously misleading her readers regarding aluminum adjuvants as well as some other issues.
I don’t use the word “lie” lightly, but frankly the author of that piece must know that her statements are not true. She has been actively suppressing comments on her own blog identifying specific falsehoods or with information that challenges her insinuations, without correcting her piece or engaging with critics. If she refuses to acknowledge, much less correct, her egregious factual problems then I think it’s fair to say she is actually lying to parents.
Not being funny, but can’t you just ban that fool?
I’m considering it–the spamming is pretty egregious.
The food and drug lists SIDS & Autism as possible side affect for DTap injection
http://experimentalvaccines.org/2014/04/04/fda-vaccine-insert-lists-autism-as-adverse-reaction/
“Possible” being the operative word there. Side effects are listed as “possible” long before they are demonstrated to be actual side effects. And in this particular instance, a large number of studies have been done that demonstrate beyond a shadow of a doubt that there is zero link between vaccines and autism.
Oh, and autism isn’t anywhere nearly as bad as death. Even if vaccines did, on rare occasions, cause autism, they’d still be worth it.
Unless it was your kid that got the autism right !
The fundamental question is ” do you really trust governments to look after your kids and yourself”
If the answer is yes then vaccinate your children without question.
If you don’t then at least consider your options and read both sides before making a decision
Most people here have considered their options, and have chosen to vaccinate. The problem is that this isn’t a decision that affects an individual, it potentially affects everyone that individual may come into contact with. If you choose not to vaccinate your children against preventable diseases, that’s fine, but keep them at home where they can’t infect anyone else’s kids.
I won’t keep my son at home, and I will NEVER Have him vaccinated again. Twelve hours after the MMR shot he started shaking his head, staring at the ceiling and he ceased talking. This REALLY happened, and it is beyond offensive that people want to call us Liars. We are VICTIMS!!! You should just pray it doesn’t happen to your kid if you give him the MMR shot. And if it does, will you still give him another? Oh, and if you don’t, should you keep him indoors for the rest of his life? Think this through thoroughly before speaking ignorantly.
Now that response is retarded! If my child ISN’T vaccinated and yours IS, why do you fear my “infected child” going near yours? Ignorance is bliss.
I know I have seen this comment somewhere else, but I still need to respond to this. How does it make any sense that an unvaccinated child would give your vaccinated child any particular disease? If vaccines work, then you should not be worried about it.
To the 3 people who replied, I can’t reply directly to you but hopefully you see this.
Vaccinations protect those who are unable to be vaccinated. If my kid has an allergy to the vaccine or is immune to its effects, and then your child gets measles because you decided not to vaccinate, my child will get the measles from your child. While it is a choice for you to have your child not give mine the measles, mine will get it from your irresponsible parenting. It’s called herd immunity.
And Michelle, nice to know you’d rather have a dead child than one with autism. You’re probably a troll anyway.
Michelle’s post just goes to show that just about anyone can get an Msed…
In response to all of the “How can my child infect your vaccinated child…” I am 41 years old and I have had many MMR vaccinations over the course of my life. For some reason, my body rejects the measles portion, leaving me vulnerable to the measles. Recently in my town, a woman on vacation went to many of my favorite restaurants and shops while unknowingly infected with measles. Every medical procedure has risks, most of them very low. Refusing medical treatments ensures that you have no benefit from them 100% of the time.
The government has nothing to do with getting your kids vaccinated you doctor does. As the commenter said in this post: Why do you suddenly trust them to treat your when when they’re sick, but not trust them to prevent the illness?
Many do not trust the pharmaceutical educated physician. Allopathic medicine may be good for emergencies only. For healing and staying healthy giving your body organic food, clean drinking water and exercise goes a long way. That is why there are chiropractors, homeopaths and naturopaths. Read these two articles One is a rebuttal to this article http://www.livingwhole.org/dear-parents-are-you-being-lied-to/ and http://4allofyou.blogspot.co.uk/2011/02/vaccines-do-not-cause-autism.html?m=1
So, instead, they trust the internet educated charlatan? Scary.
Me? I’ll stick with science.
You’ve now dropped five links to this site, without substantive comment. I’m going to add the same comment beneath each, but please stop spamming with it.
The author complains that Jennifer’s original article says that parents are being lied to, but then proceeds to lie to parents. I’ve outlined some very specific factual problems with that piece. They include, but are not limited to:
– The vaccine court has never ruled that there is a causative connection between vaccines and autism; it has ruled the exact opposite.
– There are not “countless court cases” confirming such a link; the autism omnibus proceedings have been decided and the court ruled the other way (despite her insinuation to the contrary).
– There are no vaccine inserts confirming such a link.
She is also seriously misleading her readers regarding aluminum adjuvants as well as some other issues.
I don’t use the word “lie” lightly, but frankly the author of that piece must know that her statements are not true. She has been actively suppressing comments on her own blog identifying specific falsehoods or with information that challenges her insinuations, without correcting her piece or engaging with critics. If she refuses to acknowledge, much less correct, her egregious factual problems then I think it’s fair to say she is actually lying to parents.
Fletch, your attitude is ignorant and insulting.
Both of my kids ARE autistic; and if you think there’s any part of me that would prefer they were dead, you should never, ever have children of your own.
Autism is caused by differences in the brain, and these differences are almost always found in families with a long trend of autistic traits (such as mine). Current research indicates that these differences begin in utero:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-26750786
Regardless of your beliefs, I would vaccinate my children even if I had absolute proof that vaccines could cause autism (which proof does not exist, because they can’t). If anyone can even understand the mentality of preferring a dead baby to an autistic one, to you I repeat: NEVER have children. Their imperfections–regardless of what those turn out to be–will be too much for you.
Ditto! Well said, Amanda.
(Mom of a 6 year old son with autism)
“the government” is always brought in by those who don’t have credible information. this is why people dismiss your (potentially good) arguments)
My son has autism, and I certainly prefer the autism to his being dead. If I had to do it over again, I wouldn’t change anything. Of course, I also don’t believe everything great aunt Mildred posts on facebook, either.
But you are still missing the main point. Even if a vaccine had a 1/10,000 chance of causing autism (which it doesn’t), but the disease, like Measles, has a 1/1000 chance of causing a serious effect like brain damage when you get it (which it does), how can you not take the vaccine? Pure chance alone dictates that you should take the vaccine. I just don’t get people like you.
I do not trust government. People make mistakes, they mislead when it affects their profits. This is why you have to look into each disease and each vaccine, use your critical thinking and then decide what you want for your kids. It’s a lot of work but my daughter is worth it.
There are 800,000 physicians, 250,000 life scientists and 2 million nurses actively working in the US. You really think THREE MILLION people are all “in on it” together? Or are you just smarter and somehow have access to better information?
Did you ever read a vaccine insert? The adverse reaction listed on the insert states Autsim, SIDS, encephalitis. Than read this excellent rebuttal to this article http://www.livingwhole.org/dear-parents-are-you-being-lied-to/
I don’t think that’s true. I think that the insert only states that people have reported those as adverse reactions. If you disagree, please cite an actual source.
You’ve now dropped five links to this site, without substantive comment. I’m going to add the same comment beneath each, but please stop spamming with it.
The author complains that Jennifer’s original article says that parents are being lied to, but then proceeds to lie to parents. I’ve outlined some very specific factual problems with that piece. They include, but are not limited to:
– The vaccine court has never ruled that there is a causative connection between vaccines and autism; it has ruled the exact opposite.
– There are not “countless court cases” confirming such a link; the autism omnibus proceedings have been decided and the court ruled the other way (despite her insinuation to the contrary).
– There are no vaccine inserts confirming such a link.
She is also seriously misleading her readers regarding aluminum adjuvants as well as some other issues.
I don’t use the word “lie” lightly, but frankly the author of that piece must know that her statements are not true. She has been actively suppressing comments on her own blog identifying specific falsehoods or with information that challenges her insinuations, without correcting her piece or engaging with critics. If she refuses to acknowledge, much less correct, her egregious factual problems then I think it’s fair to say she is actually lying to parents.
Jon. Do you even know how a package insert is developed? You don’t trust pharma, but their package inserts are gospel? Be consistent.
Jon, you fail to appreciate that during drug studies, everything that s reported as following a vaccination is logged as an “event”, whether causally linked to the vaccine or not. many of these things are entirely coincidental.
For instance, looking at your tripedia vaccine information, it also says this:
“In the German case-control study and US open-label safety study in which 14,971 infants received Tripedia vaccine, 13 deaths in Tripedia vaccine recipients were reported. Causes of deaths included seven SIDS, and one of each of the following: enteritis, Leigh Syndrome, adrenogenital syndrome, cardiac arrest, motor vehicle accident, and accidental drowning.”
Now only an idiot will conclude that vaccination caused drowning, or MVA, or a congenital problem
VACLIB.ORG AND DRAW YOUR OWN CONCLUSION.
Or you can go to cdc.gov and trust the people who have devoted their lives to saving lives.
^^ This. (thank you)
Thats like saying vaccines might reduce the chance of disease.Might being the the operative word. If vaccines are so effective I guess you shouldn’t worry about getting the disease from someone who is not vaccinated.
Yeah, that would be why people worry about those who can’t be vaccinated, not people who are vaccinated.
The reason people say to vaccinate your kid and yourself isn’t so the people who are already vaccinated don’t get sick, it’s so the people who can’t be vaccinated, like the very young or people with health conditions, don’t get sick.
They list it as a reported illness after someone received a vaccination. They also state that there was no causal link found between them, only that they coincided in time. As the first appearance of many signs of autism will coincide in time with one vaccine or another simply due to the frequency of injections in infants and toddlers, this is to be expected. Here’s what they said:
Click to access ucm101580.pdf
“Adverse events reported during post-approval use of Tripedia vaccine include idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura, SIDS,
anaphylactic reaction, cellulitis, autism, convulsion/grand mal convulsion, encephalopathy, hypotonia, neuropathy, somnolence
and apnea. Events were included in this list because of the seriousness or frequency of reporting. Because these events are
reported voluntarily from a population of uncertain size, it is not always possible to reliably estimate their frequencies or to
establish a causal relationship to components of Tripedia vaccine.
“
Joe, do you expect them to admit the toxic brew they inject into us is going to cause autism, SIDS and 100’s of other adverse reactions? This is as close as they will get to being truthful. Read this article http://4allofyou.blogspot.co.uk/2011/02/vaccines-do-not-cause-autism.html?m=1
Who is “they” and what exactly are you suggesting is the motive to lie to you about this? Doctors don’t get paid extra to write an order to give a vaccine, and nurses certainly don’t get paid extra to give the injection.
If you are going to imply criminal negligence, even murder, of children by healthcare professionals, please have the guts to say it outright and be prepared to defend your accusation.
Please give us the names and addresses of doctors and nurses whom you believe to be perpetrating this murderous conspiracy.
Do you have the courage of your convictions?
Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from the consequences of your words.
No, I don’t expect them to admit it, because they don’t cause SIDS or autism. SIDS coincides in time because the vaccines were given to infants, and SIDS is, well, sudden INFANT death syndrome. anyhow…
“Vaccines cause encephalitis.
Vaccines cause seizures.
Vaccines cause immune system deficiencies.
Vaccines cause gastrointestinal problems.”
Measles causes encephalitis, at a far higher rate than the MMR vaccine (1 in 1000 vs 1 in a million). It also causes febrile seizures, again at a far higher rate. Mumps can cause sterility and miscarriage. Rubella can cause mental retardation, heart defects, deafness, cataracts, miscarriage, and stillbirth in unborn children. All at far higher rates than vaccines could do anything similar. Diphtheria can kill 20% of toddlers if they catch it. Polio can cause crippling paralysis and could kill you. 450,000 kids die every year as a result of rotavirus. Tetanus kills 60,000 a year, but, due to vaccinations, only about 30 per year in the US, almost entirely among people who either weren’t vaccinated or allowed their vaccination to lapse. Smallpox will kill you,roughly 30% of the time, but guess what? Barring a biological war, we don’t have to worry about it because it’s been completely eliminated DUE TO VACCINATION.
Vaccines will *VERY* rarely cause encephalitis but save me from all that other shit, including a far higher rate of encephalitis? Sign me up. I’ll happily go all in with 4 of a kind and risk the vaccine hitting a straight flush. Apparently you love calling with a gutshot straight draw when the flop is suited.
Jon–I don’t mind you sharing links to a rebuttal a few times, but you’re now doing it at such a high frequency that it constitutes spamming. Please stop doing that, or I will have to treat it (and you) as such.
That’s not an article. It’s a blog post. i think I may have found your problem.
There has been a very recently published paper evaluating autism’s causes, citing a developmental lack of neurons in a specific brain center (someone please fill in details). It occurs between 19 and 30 weeks pregnancy, which is not a common time frame for a pregnant woman to receive vaccines anyway. If there is even a minute connection that’s theoretically possible, the FDA might state the side effect as possible, rare. That doesn’t make it proven fact.
Acta Neuropathol Commun. 2014 Mar 10;2(1):28. doi: 10.1186/2051-5960-2-28.
Brain-region-specific alterations of the trajectories of neuronal volume growth throughout the lifespan in autism.
Wegiel J1, Flory M, Kuchna I, Nowicki K, Ma SY, Imaki H, Wegiel J, Cohen IL, London E, Brown WT, Wisniewski T.
The video does not support your claim; nothing “lists SIDS & Autism as possible side [effects] for DTap” immunizations.
The insert states that those have been *reported* as adverse events, but anything can be reported for adverse events–it only means that those things happened to some patient at some point after they got a vaccine. It does not establish, or even tend to prove, that the vaccine caused those adverse events.
Fletch, a few things you should consider before buying into that video.
Autism reported as an adverse event in a vaccine’s FDA documentation does not mean what that video implies and the creator of that video is either ignorant or willfully deceiving people. Per FDA procedure, medical device and drug manufacturing companies need to track any reported adverse events related to their products. An adverse event can be any medical condition that occurs around the period of device or drug use that is reported to the company. By FDA regulation the company has to track and report these, whether they are causally related or not.
Reporting an adverse event does not require any kind of causal analysis or medical diagnosis. The person reporting the event simply has to report it to the company. It’s important to keep in mind that anyone can report an adverse event, not just trained medical personnel. So the person reporting this may have no evidence of a link between the two events and the company would still report it to FDA.
Based on this background, it’s clear that the documentation he cited in no way implies a causal connection between the vaccine and autism. Instead, it means someone had the vaccine and was diagnosed with autism, then someone else reported that fact to the company. As my statistics professor repeatedly told us, correlation does not equal causation.
One final note, the video actually skipped the substantive scientific information in that report and went straight to the adverse events which are bureaucratic and do not have scientific rigor. If you want to inform yourself on the efficacy of the vaccine, start on p. 2 of the document where it gives a history of the various clinical trials conducted to test the vaccine. That is the evidence worth looking at and anyone who skips it probably isn’t worth listening to.
I read an interesting article a little while ago, which changed the way i argue with people about this type of thing.
People who say they are entitled to their opinion are not necessarily correct.
What i mean is, no, you are not entitled to you opinion.
I can hear this infuriating people already, so just slow down and let me make my point clear. What i mean to say is, that if you wish to enter into a debate, and have your opinion on a topic count as an “actual candidate for the truth”, yet you don’t have any background, qualification or grounded understanding in what you’re arguing over, then you are not entitled to argue and not entitled to have an opinion. You can’t begin to argue over something of which you know noting. You cant vehemently argue a point which you know nothing about, and then expect to be treated with the same level as respect as those who are actually educated and qualified to talk about such points.
People’s sense of entitlement is dangerous and causing children to die. People need to understand that their opinions are just that, and they are not candidates for the truth, unless they are actually qualified to talk on a point. As we have already seen, people commence their arguments with phrases such as “now, I’m not a doctor or a scientist, but I’ve done my reading”…
The very first issue here is, you are neither of those professionals however you have attempted to read and interpret scientific and medical literature, with pre-existing views regarding this topic. You have no way of being able to understand what you are reading with enough depth to then make informed decisions, more-or-less try and inform others.
The other issue is that there is an OVERWHELMING amount of scientific evidence that completely disproves all of these theories of causation between vaccinations and autism.
Keep your bigoted and dangerous views to yourselves. You have no right to an opinion on this issue. You have less that no right, you have the responsibility to have no opinion and keep your ‘thoughts’ to yourself.
If it is acceptable to have religious/conscience exemptions for vaccinating children, why aren’t there such exemptions for every child safety and public safety law? Why shouldn’t there be exemptions for permitting children to bring guns to school, or for keeping a dangerous animal (crocodile?), or releasing dangerous gases into the neighborhood, or for corporations that want to market foods known to be contaminated or toxic? I have a religious/conscience objection to following speed limits, so I don’t have to pay the ticket, right?
So why is vaccination different?
The whole point of vaccinating is to reduce the number of infected and ill, and to limit the severity of the infection. If everyone that can be vaccinated is, we protect those who cannot be safely vaccinated.
It’s like having umbrellas in a crowd in a rainstorm. If not everyone can hold an umbrella, you get enough together, and everyone stays dry. Or if you do get wet, you’re not nearly as wet and not nearly as many people get wet by comparison. So by not using vaccines, because they might cause autism (or SIDS for that matter), we will be exposing chemo patients, HIV/AIDS patients, infants and the elderly to more diseases that might kill them, and possibly you.
I vaccinate myself, my children, my pets, and my patients whenever possible so my egg-allergic coworkers are less likely to get sick.
That’s an excellent metaphor, the umbrellas during a rainstorm. Every time someone who can carry an umbrella doesn’t, because they don’t mind getting wet, or they’re wearing a raincoat and rain boots, or they have the resources to dry off quickly once they get where they’re going, someone who can’t carry an umbrella because they’re holding a bunch of library books ends up getting soaked and ruining the library books, or who can’t carry an umbrella because they’ve got a cold and their hands are busy blowing their nose, and getting wet doesn’t help their cold any.
As another medical professional, I echo the sentiment of your poster.
http://darryl-cunningham.blogspot.co.uk/2010/05/facts-in-case-of-dr-andrew-wakefield.html?m=1
An important part of the anti-vax campaign and Autism discussion are studies like this one excerpted in the New England Journal of Medicine discussing evidence that the prenatal brain may already be developing indications consistent with future Autism.
CONCLUSIONS
In this small, explorative study, …. Our data support a probable dysregulation of layer formation and layer-specific neuronal differentiation at prenatal developmental stages.
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1307491?query=featured_home
I found the physician’s comments very insightful, and tragic. If anti-vaxxer parents believe that exposing their children to these diseases (by not vaccinating) thus ‘boosts’ their immune system, then by the same logic they should let the child’s immune system try to fight the disease. Instead, these individuals take their unvaccinated and now contagious child to the dr’s office and emergency rooms, where they have the potential to infect and kill many other individuals who either are unable to be vaccinated (due to age, or immune issues) or may not have complete immunity from vaccination. In this case, by exposing others to these pathogens, they are at best irresponsible and selfish and at most implicated in the deaths of innocents.
When I was a little girl in the 60s, I developed Chicken Pox, Measles, Mumps, German Measles, Whooping Cough (4 times) and a serious bout of pneumonia. My mother did not have the money to get the vaccines. The boy down the street did and subsequently died a year later from the flu. From the 60s/70s the rate of Autism has dropped yearly significantly enough to say that it is now rare. When I grew up and was able to afford the vaccines myself, I got them, but then I started noticing that every time I did, I became ill the next few days. I stopped taking vaccines 20 years ago and have not had the flu since but then again, I wash my hands about 50 times a day. You really have to study more about the vaccine you are getting before you get it. I took the Hep B series because the benefits outweighed the risk. What I want to know is, if your child is obese and you do not limit his food intake and push for physical health of the child, aren’t you essentially putting him at risk for diabetes, which can eventually kill the child too? If your physician says that your child could die without these vaccinations, would it be important then? As an adult, we can make these decisions for ourselves, but children have to rely on decisions adults make whether or not they are based on religious/educated or developed beliefs. You cannot just read a couple of articles and decide that you agree with the author. Because authors, just like pharmaceutical companies are trying to make money. Doctors are trying to make money. Everyone is trying to make money. But before you listen to anyone, educate yourself on facts, not what you think sounds true. Do the research. Read the chemical makeup of these vaccines. Talk to more than one doctor. Read more than one website and become more informed. My son was vaccinated and yes I took a chance. He became a Type 1diabetic at the age of 16 and not from vaccines or obesity.
“A recent large study in the US showed that no matter how scientists try to educate US parents about disease and disease prevention, whether it is vaccines or hand washing, parents simply cannot follow the logic.”
Which study? This is an incredible finding. I’d love to read about it.
The commenter was probably referring to this: http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/early/2014/02/25/peds.2013-2365
Most office cafeteria, well educated employees wash hands after the food and not before the food. Just because hand wash facility is located at the end, people fail to understand they have to wash hands before the food.
It is hard to think about how they are educated enough to take care of themselves, their kids on the pat of vaccines
Very interesting report by the cdc in March 2014 about the measles outbreak in CA, vaccinated people can “CARRY” the disease and spread it to unvaccinated people. Who are the ones we should be worried about here, when we have new babies, and immune compromised adults?
If you’re immunocomprimised, you should be taking more precautions. If there’s a public health warning about a local measles or mumps outbreak, don’t go out unnecessarily in public places. Obviously absolute quarantines aren’t going to be feasible for most adults, but limiting your risk will still help. But it’s been demonstrated that vaccines significantly reduce both the infection rate among both the vaccinated and unvaccinated:
http://jid.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2011/08/29/infdis.jir492.full.pdf+html
Herd immunity works. It’s not perfect, and neither are vaccines. That doesn’t mean that it should be avoided though, only that if you’re relying on herd immunity for protection you should probably be taking more precautions. And if you’re relying on herd immunity rather than getting a vaccine directly, it should be due to an allergy or other risk factor you have that outweighs or negates the benefit of getting a vaccine, like being immunocompromised due to an organ transplant & anti-rejection drugs.
We should be worried about BOTH the unvaccinated and the vaccinated who are not fully immune. The chance of catching and spreading the disease in question is always a lot higher with the unvaccinated. However, there are usually many more vaccinated people, so the population of vaccinated but infected because they’re not immune is present, though as a percentage a lot lower (10x to 1000x lower) than the unvaccinated. (Understanding statistics is essential when discussing vaccines- most people never learn it.) Furthermore, in the last few outbreaks have almost always been traced back to an unvaccinated traveler who brings the disease home. The key point is that the unvaccinated person (or their parents) could have done something very simple to protect themselves and others, namely get vaccinated.
My son WAS vaccinated with the MMR, and 12 hours later he became Autistic. I am NOT a Liar as this disgraceful author has accused. He started shaking his head, staring at the ceiling and he ceased speaking. This is a tragedy, and we are VICTIMS
Michelle, I absolutely believe that your son is suffering. You misunderstand me. I am not saying that you are a liar, I am saying that the people who are telling you the vaccine caused your son’s condition are lying to you. You say that he exhibited symptoms 12 hours later; others have said that symptoms appeared anywhere from instantaneously to a year later. All these things can’t be true simultaneously if the vaccine caused them. In order to understand what actually causes the syndrome, one needs to look at extremely large populations of children who have been vaccinated, and see whether there’s a statistically significant association. Many, many studies have done this, and have shown no association. What is causing autism is an incredibly important question, and we need to do more research to figure it out (it appears to be partially due to genetics). But by erroneously fixating on the MMR vaccine as the cause, we can’t effectively move forward and figure out what actually is the true cause. I think that we all agree that that is what is important.
I loved the “Parents you are being lied to…” piece. Beautifully written, researched, and thoroughly referenced. I have shared it elsewhere, along with the piece on how to read a scientific paper. I’ve been debating vaccination online for about seven years now. The levels of ignorance and fear are sometimes terrifying. I worked as a scientist (forensic, not medical) for a decade before becoming a mother; until I had my daughter I was unaware of the extent of the nightmare that is the anti-vaccination movement. I realise that some people are simply uninformed, but there is a degree of wilful ignorance which I find sometimes baffling. It so often is combined with a degree of utterly unfounded arrogance, because I am clearly a sheeple to believe the lies. Actually, more recently I have been promoted to being a pharma shill, which I guess is a compliment? And that’s just the amateurs, as it were…
Anyway, just wanted to congratulate Jennifer Raff on a splendid piece! Well done you.
Thank you!
I thoroughly agree with the sentiments of your posting, but one thing has me confused. You wrote: “…when they have meningitis or epiglottis…”. We all have an epiglottis, don’t we? It’s something that stops us drowning when we eat/drink, not something that needs curing!
Did you mean “epiglottitis”?
I think this question stems to many areas of science. As an atmospheric scientist I see similar attitudes towards climate change. One difference in this case I think has to do with our biological drive to protect children. I do think we are much more likely to jump to hastier conclusions when we feel like our children’s welfare is in jeopardy. Having become a new parent, I’ve found that some of the worst examples of Type I errors (false positives) in correlation seem to be found in parenting. People have all sorts of ideas about why kids or one way or the other. My mother-in-law who is European is convinced that our son’s health was in jeopardy simply because we weren’t giving him enough outdoor time. Sorry mom he was born in winter! lol
More generally it does come down to scientific literacy. There seems to be a great disparity in what people consider as evidence. I think this is where the problem lies. We need to teach people how to distinguish good evidence from bad. How to distinguish logical arguments from illogical ones. I’ve blogged a little bit about the problem myself: http://cloakunfurled.com/2013/10/18/evidently-its-evidence-part-ii/
Most people don’t never learn statistics, as well, contributing to problems with understanding the facts presented to them. They may see a newspaper article about an outbreak of hypothetical Disease-itis, with a report of 50 vaccinated and 50 unvaccinated kids getting sick. What they don’t realize and the reporter doesn’t mention, is that 90% of the unvaccinated kids get sick, while only 1% of the vaccinated kids get sick. All a naive parent thinks is that ‘my kids have a 50% chance of getting sick, so crazy Aunt Jenny is right, vaccines don’t work.’ Reporters over the years have sucked at telling the story properly, especially when a ‘controversy’ sells more papers and advertising than a free public service announcement to get kids vaccinated.
Argh. Correct that to “Most people never learn statistics…”
That is definitely true. Lack of understanding of probabilities is a huge problem. I don’t think it’s natural for us to have a good standing of probabilities and it is not something that is focused on in standard education curricula.
I just listened to The Skeptics Guide to the Universe podcast this morning. This particular podcast was posted on Saturday the 5th. They mention a recent study that brains from dead children were examined, both with and without autism. The study found children with autism has jumbled areas of neurons in their brains. Neurons are distributed to where they need to go during the second trimester. That may very well be the time when autism first occurs. Long before any effect of any vaccine would occur and it just makes more sense when you REALLY think about what autism really is.
I wonder if the resistance to vaccination is a result of humanities predilection to chastise crimes of commission far more than crimes of omission. If you drive by an accident and do nothing-nobody blames you for not rendering aid. However, if you drive by an accident and render aid and do not achieve the BEST possible outcome, there is liability involved. Hence the need for Good Samaritan laws. Similarly, if I don’t vaccinate and something bad happens, it was “Mother Nature’s” doing, however, if I do vaccinate and there is an adverse outcome, no matter how remote the possibility, its my fault, and unforgivable. Add in the fact that most people are so far removed from the sequlae to vaccine preventable diseases, and the risk/benefit ratio in people who are not inclined to analytical thinking tips strongly to the risk side of the equation-and people will then do anything to justify their perception.
I always read these type articles and look for the reason I avoid giving my children a select few of the current vaccines, including MMR. The vaccine is derived using cells from an aborted fetal cell line. I cannot give my children a medication that was created with the use of an aborted baby.
I don’t see an ethical dilemma here really. I understand why you have one though, I’m not trying to be dismissive. In both of the cell lines used, the fetus was going to be aborted anyway. Using those cell lines isn’t promoting further abortions, and the research that was done didn’t require or promote those abortions, it was simply made possible by them. Even if you view abortion as being evil, that doesn’t make any action that resulted from those acts evil unless those actions prompted the act. There have been several studies on the psychological effects of rape, for example. There’s a benefit there, that’s only made possible by an otherwise horrible act. But provided the studies are conducted ethically, few if any people have an objection to them. Now, if those cell lines were made possible because a modern day Dr. Mengele recruited people to procure aborted fetuses specifically for his study, that would be different, but it isn’t the case.
It should also be noted that one of the reasons for abortions prior to this vaccine becoming available was the risk of damage to the fetus if the mother became infected with rubella while pregnant. The vaccine that was made possible by the WI-38 cell line now removes that concern from mothers, and likely prevents a very large number of abortions from ever taking place.
Advocate for vaccines that don’t rely on the cell lines if it’s an ethical concern, but get vaccinated in the meantime.
Joe,
I find the Vatican’s stance on the subject of rubella vaccination quite interesting. One might suppose that they would be firmly ideologically opposed to the use of a vaccine developed using aborted foetal cell. They do indeed recommend alternative vaccines, where possible. There isn’t an alternative in the case of rubella vaccination and the conclusion of the Vatican is to accept vaccination. They, however, go further than this: “This is particularly true in the case of vaccination against German measles, because of the danger of Congenital Rubella Syndrome. This could occur, causing grave congenital malformations in the foetus, when a pregnant woman enters into contact, even if it is brief, with children who have not been immunized and are carriers of the virus. In this case, the parents who did not accept the vaccination of their own children become responsible for the malformations in question, and for the subsequent abortion of foetuses, when they have been discovered to be malformed.”
Link here: https://www.catholic.org/featured/headline.php?ID=2410&page=5
I must admit I was surprised to discover this was the case!
Cheers,
Rosewind
That’s very interesting! Thank you for the information.
Yes, I don’t suppose anyone is suggesting the Vatican is in thrall to big Pharma? It is actually rather telling the way the major religions respond to the ethical issues of vaccination. The bit I quoted above about rubella was quite striking (you don’t vaccinate your child and they infect a pregnant woman any subsequent deformities or abortion are morally on your head, harsh!). We also had a brief media flap here in the UK back in September about the nasal ‘flu vaccine (which is being given to toddlers). The nasal spray contains pork gelatine and there was a suggestion that Muslims would have to refuse it because pork gelatine is “impure” In fact:
From: IAC EXPRESS Issue Number 400 July 21, 2003
A letter written in July 2001 by the Regional Office of the World Health Organization (WHO) for the Eastern Mediterranean reported on the findings of more than one hundred Islamic legal scholars who met to clarify Islamic purity laws. The scholars met in 1995 at a seminar convened by the Islamic Organization for Medical Sciences on the topic “The Judicially Prohibited and Impure Substances in Foodstuff and Drugs.”
The topic is of interest to the immunization community because some vaccines contain pork gelatin. In Islamic law, pork and pork products are impure, and observant Muslims do not consume them. Quoting from a statement issued by the scholars, the letter states the following: “The seminar issued a number of recommendations, included in the attached statement, stipulating that ‘Transformation which means the conversion of a substance into another substance, different in characteristics, changes substances that are judicially impure . . . into pure substances, and changes substances that are prohibited into lawful and permissible substances’.”
Consequently, the scholars determined that the transformation of pork products into gelatin alters them sufficiently to make it permissible for observant Muslims to receive vaccines containing pork gelatin and to take medicine packaged in gelatin capsules.”
Again I would be shocked to hear the Islam legal scholars, all more than one hundred of them, had been got to by the pharmaceutical lobby?
More seriously, it is interesting that major religious groups seems willing to overcome what might initially seem to be quite powerful considerations in order to approve vaccination
Cheers,
Rosewind
The Catholic Church and Islam have good reason to have a pragmatic approach: They’re both prominent in poor countries where many of these diseases are still endemic. Church leaders see first-hand the results of these illnesses and it’s a fairly easy call to say yes, this act was wrong, but we’d be fools to let our people die and not make something good out of it.
I am old enough to remember all these diseases, they were not “mild”, nor “not harmful” , I remember the deafness, the blindness and my older cousins sitting by my younger cousins crib because she had to have someone there 24/7–she had whooping cough–I will never forget the sound of that “whoop”. I also remember kids at my childrens school whos parents signed for them to be opted out of the vaccinations because the kid did not like needles, they used the religion excuse.. well written article,, thank you.
First and foremost: I am still learning about this issue (from both sides, equally) and appreciate your viewpoint, Jennifer.
Secondly: I don’t think it is productive or becoming to accuse anti-vaccination advocates of lying or arguing that all of them rely solely on anecdotal information. I have read a wealth of anti-vaccination or alternate-vaccination arguments that are just as grounded in scientific research and legitimate evidence as yours. The majority of these writers have the same objective as you: to do right by their children and share what they believe that course of action to be. In general, I actually think the anti-vaccination “movement” has been much more civil and eloquent in their stance than the pro-vaccination ones, who often resort to anger and name-calling to make their point. Of course, there are guilty parties on both sides – but the pieces that have made the biggest impact on me are the ones that let the science speak for itself.
Lastly: In response to the comment you posted above, I think it should be noted that most anti-vaccination advocates do not fear or distrust doctors as individuals, but rather the medical system that trains and supports them. Most people who go into medicine do so because they want to help and heal, but so often the leaders trusted to run the profit-driven organizations behind them do not have the same intentions, or lose sight of them. I think we can all agree that further research and regulation of vaccines would put all of us more at ease, and could serve to put some of the biggest quandaries to rest.
If doctors were interested in profits, they would most certainly not vaccinate anyone!! There is so much more money to be made by treating the side-effects of disease than any vaccine. I think a day in the PICU is going to run $5000+/day around here, a vaccine is in the range of $35-$100, so conservatively speaking, vaccinating a kid is costing the doctor a minimum of $4900-for the first day in the PICU, $20,000-$30,000 for a week there, and that’s per kid. Imagine the amount of money you could make if you had the whole family in there. You could payoff of the med school loans in a couple of weeks!
I don’t believe most doctors are planning intentional harm. Most of them are threatened to demand patients have vaccinations. The consequences if these doctors don’t enforce, are to lose their medical license. That is according to 2 medical professionals (different practices) that are personal friends. Big Pharma (the ones pushing it) do have that intention. Besides, all the AI disorders and illnesses, now prevalent, are where the big profits are. Ask yourself… who stands to gain the most from all of it??? I just have more faith in my research and my God, than I do in synthetic medicine and Big Pharma.
Ginger, you have just accused thousands of physicians witth criminal behavior, and the medical boards of the same. I challenge you to provide more evidence than the hearsay of anecdotes. I do not believe there is one physician who has been threatened with license revocation because a pharmaceutical company or lobbyist told (or convincecd) the medical board to do so. Medical Boards do not have the power to threaten revocation except within their written rules and regs.
If what you are saying is true, there should be thousands of physicians out of work, based on the millions who are not currently vaccinated.
I think it is much more likely that you made an honest mistake and misunderstood what you heard. I recommend you show your post to those two physicians and ask them if that is what they meant.
Like anything else in a discussion about science,
I await the evidence.
I have read quite a few arguments against vaccination, but none of them were backed up by science. If scientific papers were referenced at all, almost always the writer either misunderstood or misused the information. Most often, the anti-vaccine argument came to the *opposite* conclusion of the scientists or clinicians who wrote the referenced journal article. The scientific and medical consensus is that vaccines save lives and are one of the top reasons for increased life expectancy. What scientific or medical qualifications have the people coming to the opposite conclusion from the vast majority of public health experts? Jill, what basis do you have for your determination that “a wealth of anti-vaccination or alternate-vaccination arguments that are just as grounded in scientific research and legitimate evidence as yours”? Have you even read Dr. Raff’s blog post about understanding a scientific article?
Jerry, are you serious? No really, are you being serious?? I provided a dozen (and that was just a sample) of peer-reviewed studies that it would appear you are conveniently ignoring. Have you ever even independently researched the subject? Your above comment is beyond absurd.
You are replying to my two day old comment about your comment which you made today. That’s not an argument unless you think I can time travel.
Besides, my point still stands: ” If scientific papers were referenced at all, almost always the writer either misunderstood or misused the information. Most often, the anti-vaccine argument came to the *opposite* conclusion of the scientists or clinicians who wrote the referenced journal article. The scientific and medical consensus is that vaccines save lives…” Your understanding is flawed and your conclusions are wrong, Matthew.
hahaha, great refutation Jerry. You did not address one argument. Must say, I’m not surprised. Your knowledge (or lack thereof) of the subject is obvious.
See my comments above at 3:35 and 3:40 directly replying to your misunderstanding of the literature you cited.
Jerry,
Above you state, “The scientific and medical consensus is that vaccines save lives and are one of the top reasons for increased life expectancy.” I Hate to bother you with facts, but life expectancy for women in the US is in decline. Not to mention that we currently rank 26 out of 36 in life expectancy of OECD members. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/21/us-life-expectancy-oecd_n_4317367.html
http://theweek.com/article/index/250795/the-mysterious-decline-in-female-life-expectancy
Very well said Jill. As a nurse who vaccinated my children many years ago, I believe parents have a responsibility to question and research everything our society encourages us to do to our children. There may be better options than the status quo. Science can make errors, and research can come to inaccurate conclusions. The name calling on both sides of the vaccination debate negates whatever the author is saying, for me. I would appreciate an honest list of possible side effects from the pro vax advocators. There can be negative outcomes even if overall the positives are far greater.
An unemotional unbiased stating of known facts lets us all evaluate and come to our own conclusions. I respect parental rights to make these decisions for their children whether I agree or not.
I am a bit on the fence about this topic now, especially with some of the newer vaccines and certainly the time table.
I grew up in the era when everyone got both types of measles and mumps and chicken pox ( pre vax available). No one I knew had any serious side effects and we have life long immunity. Statistically the odds are low that that the devastating side effects will result if your child gets the disease. Canada has had large outbreaks of measles for the past 2years, and no one has died. If the number of cases get much higher, statistically deaths will start to occur. I’m not denying that there can be tragic outcomes, but lets stop the scare tactics on both sides of the debate.
The “parents, you are being lied to” title used sensationalism in an otherwise interesting well written argument for vaccinating. Lose the emotion and state the facts, positive and negative!
Ok. Not innoculating for measles will cost 3.8 billion per year and result in 1859 deaths. The vaccination program costs 44 million annually.
http://jid.oxfordjournals.org/content/189/Supplement_1/S1.long
The latest rate for autism spectrum disorder (not autism, anything on the spectrum) is one in 68.
http://www.autismspeaks.org/science/science-news/autism%E2%80%99s-rising-numbers-qa-autism-speaks-chief-science-officer
Lets take that 3.8 billion dollars, and use it to treat the ~27 living kids with autism that wasn’t caused by the vaccine program and who survived thanks to the vaccine.
Nancy- Most people are not qualified to “research everything” and “come to our own conclusions” (your words). That’s okay, most people are also not qualified to do their own electrical wiring, plumbing, engine rebuilds, home renovation, or major surgery. Are you also in favor of do it yourself approaches to those problems as well? Why ever not? Maybe something closer to your own experience. When you were a practicing nurse, did you ever see the outcome of, for example, home remedies for major burns? I suspect the burn healing outcome was worse after the home remedy than if the person came in for professional care. The anti-vaccine position is a “home remedy” not a valid alternate professional opinion. I think when we hire experts, we should listen to them or have a darned good reason to totally disregard their advice. The anti-vax side boils down to no reasons, just fears.
Follow-up to Jill- From a recent NPR article on vaccine-preventable disease outbreaks: http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2014/04/06/299910441/how-public-health-advocates-are-trying-to-reach-non-vaccinators
” “I think there are those parents that come in with their mind made up, and there’s nothing you can say to sway them,” says Lisa Leavitt.
A study at Dartmouth College supports that theory. Political scientists surveyed nearly 1,800 parents about the vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella (MMR). What they found was that the more skeptical parents are about vaccines, the less likely they are to listen to public service ads or to their pediatricians.”
Link to write-up of Dartmouth study: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/antivaccination-parents-dig-in-heels-even-after-receiving-medical-info/
If you want “unemotional unbiased facts” you will need to read original research and rather than rhetoric. If your only source for information about a controversial issue is listening to “both sides of the … debate” then you probably know a lot about the debate and very little about the underlying facts.
I don’t think that most people have the scientific literacy to read and evaluate scientific literature on its merits (mostly because it isn’t emphasized in schools), but that doesn’t mean that rhetoric is a proper substitute in forming an opinion. Yes, parents absolutely have the right to question everything. A corollary to that is whether or not they have the tools to do so effectively. Unfortunately I think the average American does not have the skills to assess scientific claims and yet very much wishes to exercise their right to question , which leaves them at the mercy of rhetoricitians with agendas.
I don’t have an immediate solution for this problem of people wanting to vet scientific ideas that they do not have the the skills to adequately assess, but I can assure you that if you are reading things that engage in name-calling, etc. you are stuck in the rhetorical mudhole and need to switch up your sources!
When measles was at its highest level recorded in Canada, there were 892 measles-related deaths that year.
http://m.jid.oxfordjournals.org/content/189/Supplement_1/S236.long
Your memory of whether or not there were severe, even lethal complications from measles in anyone you knew is not the science we want to rely on for making public health decisions.
According to http://www.msss.gouv.qc.ca/en/sujets/prob_sante/measles/portrait2011.php
There were 776 reported (725 confirmed by testing) cases of measles in Canada in 2011, 11% required hospitalization (is that “minor” or “mild”?) and 29 of the cases were infants too young to be immunized.
Since the MMR vaccine, when given according to recommendations, is 95% effective at protecting against measles (same source), and 79% of the cases were not immunized, you can see that it is very unlikely the outbreak would have been nearly as large if the population was effectively vaccinated.
Where are the voices from the families of those who got measles but were not eligible (like the 29 infants) for the vaccine, but who were infected by those who chose not to be vaccinated?
I think a lot of the name calling comes from how many on the two sides see the issue, Anti-vaccination advocates seem to see it as a personal rights issue and protecting their own child, if you vaccinate your kid it won’t hurt theirs, where as vaccination advocates see it as public health issue, not vaccinating one kid does have the potential to hurt others.
I think that’s an insightful observation.
Jill,
Your equivocal spirit is to be commended, but issues of objective fact really deserve a different type of inquiry than one framed around “sides”. Certainly I’m not denying that people “take sides” on scientific issues; however, I don’t think that the best way of assessing an underlying objective proposition for yourself is to listen to both “sides” and assess their respective narratives. To do so is to analyze the debate itself and not the underlying objective issue or, worse, to confuse rhetoric surrounding an issue with the issue itself.
Whether or not one side speaks with a particular tone, has a particular objective or intention, is civil or eloquent, etc. — these are all properties of rhetoric, independent of the objective facts under consideration. What is required to assess objective truth-claims, however, is very different from what is required to assess rhetoric. Both are important — no doubt; it can be necessary to sort through rhetoric to be able to find the truth-claims, for example. But whatever rhetoric a truth-claim is embedded in (that is, however a claim about what is true is expressed), it is the logic of science that should be paramount in evaluating whether or not that claim is true.
My wholly unsolicited advice would be to let the evidence guide you to a side, rather than let the sides/movements guide you to “their” evidence. That is, read the primary (i.e. based on original research) literature on vaccination published in peer-reviewed journals and come to your conclusions on that basis. This is way harder, as it requires that you have a solid understanding of the scientific method and use it to assess the quality of the evidence in light of the claims being made. If you aren’t able to navigate the literature without one side or the other framing it for you, though, then you aren’t necessarily in a position to say which side is or isn’t “grounded in scientific research and legitimate evidence” without depending on the rhetoric of that “side”. Even letting “the science speak for itself” involves a rhetorical process of selection and framing.
It would seem that much of your perspective on vaccination comes down to trustworthiness, which is intimately tied with things like rhetorical style and intention. However, people with terrible intentions can do great science just like people with great intentions can do horrible science. Likewise, rhetorical style and tone are not effective ways to vet whether someone is telling the truth or not. That is, neither the rhetorical style someone uses or the intentions that they have have any bearing on the actual evidence they have, so to frame the issue around trust is to undermine the actual evidence! Indeed, the constant calls from the anti-vaccine movement for more research is a direct consequence of a prima facie mistrust of official statistics on vaccine safety, which can never be resolved by producing more evidence.
No. I cannot agree that “further research and regulation of vaccines would put all of us more at ease, and could serve to put some of the biggest quandaries to rest,” for 2 reasons: 1, I’m not ill-at-ease regarding vaccines in the first place; and 2, there is a wealth of reliable information regarding the safety and efficacy of vaccines already available, yet somehow, it is never good enough for those who who wish to ignore it.
As many people on this thread have already stated, the problem is not proving that vaccines are safe; it’s getting enough people educated enough to be able to correctly interpret the scientific data that explain how and why vaccines are (relatively, comparatively) safe. Evidence cannot speak for itself. That would be like a book reading itself to you AND then explaining the plot twists (if those twists contained normal distribution and bar charts and p-values and t-tests, and the difference between statistically significant data and data that are not statistically significant, and why correlation is not causation and the basics of epidemiology, etc etc etc).
That’s not feasible. I don’t believe it’s possible for every normally-functioning adult to learn all the skills they’d need for this task, because interpreting medical/scientific data is NOT like driving a car or baking a cake (both of which are complex tasks, requiring multiple skills and reasonable intelligence, by the way). Interpreting scientific data requires a much more rigorous approach, and a type of intelligence and level of education that many people will not be able to achieve (for a variety of reasons). Becoming an adequate researcher or scientist typically takes several years of training and education (some people call that university) and even then, not everyone who graduates from university acquires scientific skills–only (most of) those who graduate with a science degree will.
Non-scientists telling scientists that they “don’t agree with” their results, or telling them to conduct more tests/how to do it, is very much like a fish telling a bird they don’t really know how to fly, but the fish can give them some pointers. If you cannot do it yourself, have not been trained both to conduct and also to interpret data according to strict scientific protocols, you don’t get a say in this. Listen to the people who have educated themselves appropriately in this area, who know the data and the process whereby they were obtained.
Thank you. The first objective response that considers more than one view.
Thank you, Jill. I’m not a fan of name-calling either, though I’ve had plenty of invective directed at me over the last few days! But my use of the word “lying” is appropriate. Again, I do believe that the majority of anti-vaccine parents aren’t lying or have bad intentions–they’re simply misinformed. A look through the comments on this and the previous post will illustrate how little people know about how the immune system actually works, and how vaccines are developed and tested for safety. The onus is on doctors, science educators like myself, and journalists to change that–that’s our problem to deal with. But we’re contending with organizations and people who are deliberately trying to mislead people: for example, Andrew Wakefield continues to maintain that his findings–which were shown to be based on deliberately falsified data–are true. (http://www.bmj.com/content/342/bmj.c7452). He, and others like him, are trying to deceive you.
When you say that you’ve read “a wealth of anti-vaccination or alternate-vaccination arguments that are just as grounded in scientific research and legitimate evidence as yours”, I commend you on doing so much research, but I have to caution you that the “evidence” that they utilize is not legitimate. All of the weight of science is on one side of the question. Anti-vaxxers will, of course, say the same thing about me, and so I acknowledge that this puts parents like you in something of a bind. To someone without a scientific background (which may or may not apply to you, I don’t know) it appears to be a simple case of “he said/she said” with parents on one side and “Big Pharma” funded doctors and scientists on the other. This is a powerful narrative, and a reason why physicians and scientists have so much trouble getting their point across in forums such as these. It’s why I posted my CV, so people like you could see exactly what experience I have and who pays me. But even though I’m completely open about who I am and where I work, I still get accusations that I’m a) unqualified (a “so-called scientist”), b) lying about my background, or c) secretly being funded by Big Pharma to write the things I write. These accusations are too ridiculous to bother me, but I think they are useful to illustrate the reflexive reactions anti-vaxxers have to people who speak out about the science on this issue.
Since you are open minded (a rarity in this debate!), please consider a few things. First, as several physicians here have pointed out, in countries other than the United States, they don’t receive any money from “Big Pharma”, yet doctors across the world agree on the necessity of vaccination. How does that square with a profit motive?
Second, the vast majority of doctors and nurses vaccinate their own children. Would they do that if they knew that vaccines were unsafe? I myself have had all recommended vaccines (and some additional ones that most people don’t get, like rabies), including the flu shot every single year. I do that because I understand how vaccines work, how the immune system works, and how robustly their safety has been tested. I am around children and elderly people, and I feel that it is my duty to protect their health as well as my own.
Take a close look at how people in these two comment sections respond to facts and to being challenged. Ignore the heated rhetoric and name-calling (which is completely unhelpful in this debate) and focus on the substantive discussions. What are people really citing as evidence to back up their position?
Finally, just for your future reference, here is an outstanding collection of vaccine safety articles that I recommend all parents read :http://www2.aap.org/immunization/families/faq/vaccinestudies.pdf. If you’re going to be doing research on both sides of the debate, I suggest that you add this to your “pro-vaccines” collection.
My son was a typically Functioning child, and 12 hours after the MMR shot, he started shaking his head back and forth, staring at the ceiling, and he ceased speaking. That is a fact. Documented as well. Our lives have changed since Vaccination day, and when he finally was able to say “NO” or “YES” at age six, we celebrated for weeks. Before the shot he was speaking many words. Do you presume to say that it was a coincidence that this reaction occurred 12 hours after the MMR shot? If so, Is it also a coincidence for the other million families that it has happened to? 1 in 68 children are now Autistic, a 30 percent rise in 2 years according to the CDC.
If you vaccinate your child with the MMR, and this happens to you, I’m sure you’ll change your tune. And if you did vaccinate your sweetie, and they came out Autistic, a lifelong challenge, disability, then would you continue to put the same vaccines into him at each appointment? I highly doubt it, unless you had a death wish for your child.
Think before you upset VICTIMS of the shots. We are not Liars. We are VICTIMS!
And furthermore, You are a sanctimonious and BAD person. SHAME ON YOU< Jennifer Raff.
You’re just repeating basically the same thing without addressing any of the people replying to you. Are you reading any of the replies to your comments? Any at all? Even though you are wrong about vaccines, no one is calling you a liar. By the way, my son is on the autism spectrum, and I’ll thank you not to imply that he is a “victim”. I’m not either. I am sad to see that you think you are.
I think pediatrician and all doctors should refuse to treat patients that refuse to be vaccinated.
Siggy, do you honestly believe a pediatrician should refuse care to a suffering child because of a decision its parents made on its behalf? By that same logic doctors should refuse to treat heart patients whose illness is linked to their obesity. Or refuse to treat liver illness in those who are alcoholics. Or refuse to treat lung cancer in those who smoke. Perhaps they should even refuse to treat sports related injuries. After all, anyone who engages in sports does so knowing that there’s a possibility of injury.
Doctors acting unethically is not an answer to patients acting irresponsibly.
Actually,you’ll find it very hard to get a liver transplant for your cirrhosis from alcohol consumption-transplant surgeons will not operate generally unless you can prove to them that you have stopped drinking and will not drink.
Yes, I do think think that doctors should not put other patients at risk to treat the stupidity of the parents. There’s nothing like a good case of pertussis running through an ICU full of sick, immunocompromised (because they are deathly sick) kids, to really make the doctors earn their paycheck. Plus-they lose sick kids that could have been saved had somebody not introduced pertussis to ICU.
Except that the article wasn’t saying “Refuse to try to cure the child after the disease has been contracted”, it was saying that doctors are refusing to take on a new patient who hasn’t been vaccinated, who could unknowingly bring a disease into a room full of children and babies and people who are already sick.
So by this logic, doctors can treat heart patients whose illness is linked to their obesity, or liver illness in alcoholics.
But they can refuse to take on a smoker as a patient, because in this scenario, the smoker has a cigarette lit at all times. In the waiting room of the doctor’s office, they’re just puffing away. Sitting in the examination room with the doctor or the nurse, they’re taking a new cigarette from the pack and lighting up. And in this situation, and the important thing about this, is that the smoker can harm others. There’s secondhand smoke. There might be people in that waiting room with asthma who can’t breathe when someone comes in reeking of smoke.
We already have laws prohibiting smoking in restaurants and other public places, because we acknowledge that secondhand smoke can have bad effects on others. So why don’t we implement this rule for unvaccinated people as well? We refuse to let you come into this restaurant and risk harming people, whether that’s by smoke or by the possibility of spreading disease to people who can’t fight it.
Point taken about the public health angle. The analogy is still flawed, though — at least when applied to kids — because the smoker with the constantly lit cigarette didn’t choose to smoke it. So, we are stuck in the ethical muck of whether or not to punish the innocent or the sins of the parent.
Right, and I agree entirely about not punishing the child!
But refusing to take on a patient, as a doctor, isn’t punishing the child. “I will not take your child on as one of my patients. You have to find someone else to give them a general physical each year, and to prescribe medicines for the small things that all children get.”
That’s not punishing the kid, that’s more on the line of shaming the parent, inconveniencing the parent. No child is being punished by not visiting a specific pediatrician, or by not getting their yearly checkup.
If the smoker actually does end up with cancer, we’re going to treat them, obviously, because we want to take care of people! But before that, when it’s still up in the air whether they will get lung cancer, the doctor is refusing to have the person surrounded by a cloud of smoke sitting in the waiting room making everyone else just as ill as they are.
Basically, it’s
“Hello, I’m Jane Doe, I need to find a pediatrician for my child, Casey Doe.”
“Is Casey vaccinated? We’re very careful about the health of all of our patients and don’t want to risk other patients’ health if Casey has something serious.”
“No, Casey isn’t vaccinated.”
“Then I’m sorry, but Doctor Something cannot take on Casey as a patient.”
“Hello? I’m Jane Doe, my child Casey is sick. Can I come in and get them looked at, and get medicine?”
“If Casey is ill, we’ll look at the schedule and see if we can fit you in somewhere, when there will be fewer patients in the waiting room.”
“We can fit you in at 9am.”
“That’s inconvenient to me!”
“Can you make it in? We do not want your child in the waiting area for an extended period of time, so there is a limited area of time when we can fit you in.”
“Yes, I can be there.”
“Hello?! My child is very sick, I don’t know what’s wrong but they are very ill, I need them seen!”
“Of course. Bring them in, we’ll do everything we can for your child’s health.”
Jane Doe is forced to find another pediatrician or forgo checkups or such.
Jane Doe is inconvenienced.
But nobody is punishing Jane Doe’s child.
Let’s not lose sight of the fact that pediatric patients do not refuse vaccination — their parents or guardians do.
I’m just going to drop this off for everyone’s consideration/comments : http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2014/04/07/300232844/measles-at-a-rock-concert-goes-viral-in-a-bad-way?utm_source=health&utm_campaign=nprnews&utm_medium=twitter
I think someone copied your original blog post title on this subject. Prepare for frustration………
http://gianelloni.wordpress.com/2014/04/07/dear-parents-you-are-being-lied-to/
Love how they closed comments because it was “guest written”
It’s the internet, they’ll have to work harder than that to shut down discussion: https://violentmetaphors.com/2014/03/25/parents-you-are-being-lied-to/comment-page-9/#comment-19685
From my Grandmother and her elders telling me the terrible diseases that friends, family, siblings, etc. had to live with before some of these things were under control I don’t understand why this is even questioned…I know that my family is living longer due to advances like this since we seem to have a high percentage of us born with weaker immune systems (including myself) as far back as we have been able to trace our family tree. I am not in the medical field but I think common sense and just a general review of history proves what we have accomplished, but I love this video about vaccines.
*warning it does have explicit language, but just see beyond that please*
There may be uneducated views on the anti-vaccine side, but this is ridiculous! Penn and Teller? You get your information from a magician? Please, if you want to strengthen your argument, using this over simplistic argument is just silly. And you think anti-vaxers have non-credible resources? My oh my.
Oh for pity’s sake, they don’t get their information from a magician, they aren’t sitting here trying to convince you! That’s what the article is for! They specifically posted this saying “I love this video about vaccines”.
As in, I think this video about vaccines is clever and well done. Not, I get all of my information from this video and I think vaccines are good because the magicians say so.
Come on, if an anti-vaxer posted this they would get ripped apart. You and I both know that. THAT was my point.
Then please post an anti-vax citation that is actual science, and not a blogger with little/no biology education writing about the science.
http://gianelloni.wordpress.com/2013/09/13/why-all-the-measles-outbreaks/
http://gianelloni.wordpress.com/2013/09/13/why-all-the-measles-outbreaks/
This blogger has compiled all the reputable links necessary to answer all your questions. A blogger she may be, but her information is entirely backed up by REAL medical studies and statistics.
Ginger, what are that blogger’s qualifications to understand and verify “all the reputable links” and all the conclusions, methods, statistics?
How do you know she reviewed ALL the relevant scientific literature and was able to discern the truth that somehow eluded the vast majority of the professionals in the field?
Shall we rely on my 8th grade math teacher’s (after all, engineering is just complicated math, right?) criticism of the new bridge design proposal and change it according to his recommendations, or would you prefer to have a few educated, trained, and experienced bridge engineers look at the criticsm before you change the design and drive your family over it?
I just checked.
Unless Gianelloni is hiding her education from us, she has no significant immunology/biology/medical education or training.
It’s likely that she had to take a few semesters of biology for her psychology degree, but if there is more than that, it is not evident from what she posts about herself. If there is more, I’d be happy to hear.
So we are back to the amateur criticisms about the bridge design.
Who would you like to build it?
Yea, now look for commentary on those studies. Actually read them. They are, by and large, either poorly constructed or they simply don’t say what the blog authors believe they do. One studies the link between thimerosol & autism, but thimerosol hasn’t been used in childhood vaccines since 2002, and autism diagnoses are continuing to smoothly rise. The next looks at Hep-B vaccinations and autism, using a meta-study (a study of studies), and fails to notice that a large portion of it’s sample wasn’t in a cohort that was given the Hep-B vaccine, since they pre-dated it by 11 years. The third study looks at autism and the aluminium adjuvant. It compares 2 groups from 2 different geographical areas who received 2 different vaccine schedules, and pre-supposed that the adjuvant was the only possible cause of the differences in ASD diagnoses.
Should I keep going?
Ginger, and “Gianelloni” points out herself, 80% is sufficient to prevent SUSTAINED outbreaks – NOT PREVENT ALL CASES. And in fact, the outbreaks we see are not sustained. They pop up in different cities every year and infect as many as dozens, maybe hundreds if it’s a particularly bad outbreak, but thanks to the high vaccination levels in the US, we don’t see the MILLIONS of cases we used to see before widespread use of MMR.
It’s handy that she correctly cites the conclusion “SUSTAINED outbreaks”, but then proceeds to write as if the existence of seasonal outbreaks, which amount to a few cases, refutes herd immunity.
Very interesting article. I happen to vaccinate my child but worked with our pediatrician on an alternative schedule. I felt certain vaccines, after thorough research, weren’t necessary at certain times.
That being said, I am curious about your opinion on a recent article that came out of UCONN where they gave the MMR vaccine to a certain type of chimp babies and they started to show signs of autistic traits where as the other baby chimps that were not given the vaccine showed none of these traits.
Citation, please? I did a search on PubMed as well as scholar.google.com, using key words “University of Connecticut MMR vaccine chimp autism” and came up with nothing close to your allegations. Even the most recent journal article regarding autism was from 2007. Secondly, what is your expertise for performing your thorough research?
He may have been referring to this:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20628439
And a thorough rebuttal (TLDR: it had 16 animals, 3 in the control group, ignored previous research, and the differences noticed were, well, small.): http://www.ane.pl/pdf/7114.pdf
This is peer review. It’s not enough to simply get a study published in a journal, you have to look at the review of that study as well.
The chimp study was even worse than you state, Joe. In the end, only 12 chimps were tested- 9 vs. 2 controls. The study authors had done previous work showing the exact opposite result w.r.t. amygdala growth, and had not accounted for confounding factors. Not really good work. (Thanks for the links, btw.)
Oh rats. 11 total chimps, not 12. Even after grad degrees, you’d think I wouldn’t have to remove my sock to count higher than 10.
My son became Autistic 12 hour after the MMR. Honestly. I can’t explain why, but it happened. It’s offensive to be called a liar after we have suffered so much. Glad that you are questioning it. So many people remain ignorant and are lied to. Very sad indeed.
Who is calling you a liar? You can be completely right about your son having autism (like mine), but completely wrong about the cause and not be a liar -just misguided. I don’t have any anger towards parents who are trying their best to find answers. I reserve my scorn and fury for the people who are actively trying to mislead people for profit (like those sadists selling bleach enemas and “Gerson therapy”, which are child abuse). But fellow parents? Not at all. As far as MMR, that has been extensively tested- there is no link between MMR and autism. Honestly, no connection. 12 hours is too short a time for almost anything to affect the brain short of 105 fever or concussion. The symptoms of autism show up around the same time as vaccines are administered, that’s all. What causes autism? Some early research shows brain nerve connections going wrong around the third month of gestation, but even that is too preliminary to call it “the cause”. Sometimes we just don’t know every answer… Not yet, anyway. So yes, people are being lied to, but it’s not by the doctors or scientists.
My son was fine…FINE fine. Made eye contact. Said mommy, doggie, kittie. Smiled…laughed. ..he had his vaccine…arm swollen, fever. Vomited and had a seizure. We took him to the hospital. No worries, said the doctors. Until two days later when he refused to make eye contact. Began banging his head on the wall. Climbing, twirling, endangering himself chasing the car wheels down the road. Refusing to hug me, always rocking…lost the few words he had begun speaking. Potty trained at the age of seven.That was 32 years ago. I KNOW IT WAS THE VACCINATION.
You might not believe me, but I mean no disrespect to you, your son, or the difficulties you have all endured.
But I do want to ask how you know the vaccine caused this.
What precisely makes you sure these were not two unrelated things that happened in a short period of time? What leads you to that conclusion other than the timing?
What other possibilities have you considered, and why did you reject those other possiblities?
gewisn: As laudable as it is that you’ve tried to engage Diane Olivia Valentine in mutually respectful, intelligent conversation, your efforts are doomed. Any person who “knows” the (single? exact?) cause of a complex neurological condition based on a layman’s observation, no scientific training or testing, and without even the basic knowledge of the scientific method to be able to explain why their “findings” are not just an assumption that correlation equals causation, will not be able to follow a more logical train of thought. More to the point, a person with that mindset won’t even try.
When my daughter regressed, plateau’d, and gradually began to advance developmentally again, I never chalked it up to the MMR (although several mums I knew tried to convince me that it could have been). On the contrary, I saw her regression as an understandable reaction to an over-stimulating world, that she was more aware of due to being older (i.e. the way that children begin life assuming that only they are real/alive, and then slowly realize everyone else is… you could see it on her face; the day she realized people were looking at her, she started to look away from them).
After nearly 8 years of parenting a wonderful child who was diagnosed as severely autistic before her second birthday, and nearly 6 years of parenting a slightly-less-severely autistic and equally wonderful child who was diagnosed before his 3rd birthday, I have little to no patience for parents who act like the victims of their children’s imperfections. As I said, I believe your intentions are laudable, here; but (unless you’ve *also* spent the last 6+ years being inundated with fake-science and anecdotal “evidence” and *intensely* rigid thinking patterns by the parents of your autistic children’s peers) I am better-equipped than you to assess this situation. Trust me. You will make no headway with this individual.
God/Fate/Karma/The Universe bless you for trying, though.
Thank you for sharing that–it’s very thought-provoking. I hope your children are doing well.
I agree that someone who posts an angry or strident anti-vax sentiment is almost certainly not going to change their minds in a situation like this. But as you suggest, I think there’s a real value to comments that try to reach them. If nothing else, it leaves a reminder for people who are reading and who are on the fence that there are deeper, more complex questions at play than seem apparent at first.
Thanks, Colin (Colin the lawyer, right? Who posts to explain to us that legal findings are not the same as scientific proof?). I am well aware that this is an emotive subject for me, in which my logic skills may not be at their best, so I’m pleased there was something of value in my statements. And to state it more explicitly–yes, I wholeheartedly approve of those who try to reach anti-vaxxers; I just can’t do it anymore. Most of all, I can’t keep listening to the same “my child was stolen/broken/lost and is now a ghost/shadow/spectre of himself” rhetoric. I simply can’t deal with that, anymore.
My kids are fantastic, and doing very well, thank you. It’s the progress they make that has opened my eyes to the possibility that, in many cases of ASD (all but the most severe) autism isn’t a disability, but a difference. My children (both diagnosed as having severe/classic autism) are both now verbal, and my son in particular is exceedingly friendly and empathetic and chatty. My daughter has a wicked sense of humour–she’s the sort of person who will move something that’s yours, then sit nearby and giggle while you search for it. Difficulties with language and self-help skills aside, my kids are “whole” people, with complete personalities, and they bring me so much joy. Yes, the challenges of raising them are unique and sometimes require all my creativity and skill and experience–but isn’t that true for any child?
Oh, and How dare you!
We know we are being lied to. That’s not the debate. The question is, “WHO” is lying to us? We know the Government manipulates the Media to control our opinions. They lie to us regularly. That’s not in question. Our job is trying to decipher what is truth, what is a lie? They are corrupt and controlled by Special Interest Groups. Now we turn to Science. Science community tells us Fluoride and GMOs are good for us. No brainer! We know that’s a lie! How can consuming poisons be good for you? Who is left? The Charities tell us to get vaccinated. Certain ones are in India and Africa saving lives with Polio Vaccines, a disease that died 30 or so years ago. Suddenly, there are many cases of Polio in India and Africa! Where did it come from? When the Indian “Terrorists” entered the Clinic and killed all the Volunteer Nurses and support group, I was appalled, as most people were, until I learned their kids got sick from the vaccine… Benghazi prelude. When will we learn? Back to my original question… “Who! Is lying to us? (It seems like EVERYONE)!
And now, back to our regularly scheduled progam…
I agree, its pretty much hard to trust anything you hear these days.
I’m curious, Emberlynn (and this is an entirely sincere question)–what kind of evidence would convince you? What tools do you need in order to evaluate different sides of the argument?
Would it make a difference if you found out that MDs and infectious disease specialists vaccinate their own kids?
John,
If everyone is lying, then we should assume that you are lying, too.
But if you are lying, then you were lying when you said that everyone is lying.
That means that not everyone is lying, so you must have been lying when you told us that everyone is lying.
I hope you realize that you have just called millions of suffering victims Liars. I assure you that my son was typically functioning and 12 hours after the shot, he became autistic. He started staring at the ceiling, shaking his head and hands, and he stopped talking. Am I a Liar too? I am Not. I am also Not a scientist or doctor, and won’t even begin to talk about studies, though many support the fact that the MMR can cause Autism. Where are those studies listed here? Exactly… Are you personally just trying to alleviate your worry about vaccinating your own kids? Why not go and find a holocaust survivor and tell them that the Holocaust never happened too, while you’re at it… Whatever. I put it like this to people. If a BEE Sting can kill a person, then why wouldn’t a shot? Some people have no reaction to a bee sting, some have some pain, and others die. It’s a crap shoot if you vaccinate your kids. Wish I never had. Blessings.
Michelle, I also mean no disrespect to you our your family, but no one on here (that I am seeing) has said or implied that your son does not have autism, so there is no need to suggest those discussing the science behind vaccination are like holocaust deniers. We are talking about whether vaccines cause autism – not whether it happens.
But I will pose the same questions to as I have to others:
What, besides the timing, convinced you that the vaccination caused the autism?
What other possibilities have you considered, and why did you reject those possibilities?
A bee sting can kill some people (should we wipe out all bees and destroy our food supply?), due to principles of immunology that are quite well known. That is the same science that confirms, over and over, the high safety (not perfection because nothing is perfect, but much higher safety than Demerol or penicillin), and the same science that confirms the risk of horrible suffering and death from the diseases themselves – a risk much higher than that of the vaccinations.
She never stated that children didn’t have autism, so in addition to being ridiculously inflammatory, your holocaust analogy is horribly flawed. She also didn’t state that the parents or children who have autism are the liars, so again, that claim is ridiculous. The studies linking MMR to autism are flawed, as can be easily determined by actually reading them. It’s a blog post, it isn’t supposed to contain every article ever published on the subject in pubmed. Yes, there is risk associated with vaccines, as there is with virtually any medical treatment that actually works (unlike, I’ll note, thetahealing). Those risks are far outweighed by the risks of harm if you actually contract one of the diseases that are vaccinated against. For example, if you get measles, you’re 1000 times more likely to get encephalitis that you are as a consequence of the vaccine. Fortunately, due to the vaccination program, measles is no longer endemic where we live. People die from bee stings because they’re allergic to them. Similarly, people with egg allergies shouldn’t and don’t get certain vaccinations. The thing is though…bee sting also have no medical benefit, and vaccines save millions of lives ever year. Advocating against vaccines because they carry a small risk of harm you is akin to arguing against seatbelts because in certain rare cases, they may make it difficult to get out of a wreck following a crash. Totally ignoring that the trauma from being unrestrained in an accident is a far greater risk.
Actually, I don’t trust the medical community unless its for trauma situations (i.e. gunshot wounds, car accidents). Drugs harm us more than they help us. Pharmaceuticals are poison, just look at all the side effects (no thank you, I do not want to end up with a chemical imbalance in my brain or diabetes, both of which a friend of mine contracted after taking medication which he didn’t know produces these side effects). Most symptoms can be fixed with proper nutrition and exercise.
Go ahead and try to cure polio with your diet.
You understand that you’ll get pharmaceuticals in trauma situations too, right? Painkillers, antibiotics, volume expanders… it’s not like they just set your bones and send you on your way.
Also, ideally doctors would like to treat the disease, not the symptoms. Just one of those things the medical community is good for.
What a great article, Thanks Jennifer Raff for your time and effort towards public health and understanding. This was much needed.
And of course there is that very important lie that the anti-vaccine lobby also tell parents of autistic children; they’ll tell them that people who say there is no causative link between vaccination and ASD are calling them (the parents) liars. That we are all saying they haven’t seen their own child regress. That we are denying their suffering, and that we are utterly lacking in empathy. That we mock their pain.
We don’t. Some of us (I don’t, but I have friends who do and there are contributors in these comments too) have autistic children ourselves. Do we think vaccinations caused this? No. Because, possibly contrary to our own experience, the actual evidence leading to the overwhelming scientific consensus says that there is no causative link. The results of science are sometimes counterintuitive. Sometimes one thing follows hard on another’s heels not because of it, but for other reasons. Reasons which aren’t always clear. One of the reasons we have developed the scientific method is because we humans love a good story, and sometimes we can be led astray by this desire to see patterns where they simply don’t exist. As Richard Feynman said: “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool.”
Literally hundreds of thousands of research hours have been spent trying to find any possible causative link between vaccination and ASD. There isn’t one. The researchers who are reaching these conclusions are not doing so because they hate the parents of ASD children. They are not saying this because they wish to laugh at children with complex neurodevelopmental disorders. These are people who have committed their lives to trying to understand, to unravel the complex mesh of cause and effect that surrounds ASD. They’re scientists and, unlike many of the proponents of the vaccination ASD myth, many of them aren’t particularly media savvy or charismatic. But they work very hard and with great dedication, and the conclusion of their work, the consensus, is that vaccination is not causally linked to ASD.
The scientific community is not accusing parents of children with ASD who believe it was caused by vaccines liars. They go to great pains to understand why this belief exists and is so prevalent. They also try time and time again to understand how to get their message across, whilst showing utmost respect for the parents involved. They, we, know it’s a message which will be met with resistance, and often the message is complex and not easy to put in a soundbite. The anti-vaccine lobby have it easy, they have a message that parents want to hear, and are not hamstrung by things like the need to tell the truth.
Cheers,
Rosewind
I have a question for anyone/everyone:
Can you describe the some very specific examples of evidence that would change your mind?
To be honest and open, to convince to change my mind about vaccines would require that there by multiple large prospective studies, that have been confirmed several times. Once this becomes convincing to at least two of the larger relevant national medical associations, then I will start to accept that the tide has turned and something is very different than we have understood previously.
I have enough graduate education to read the medical studies and understand them myself, but not enough to know all the subtleties and be able to discern all the precise pros/cons of contradictory conclusions from two high-level, well-documented studies in prominent journals. That’s when editorial boards become even more important.
To keep track of many journals, the astute and concise experts at publications like Journal Watch are invaluable.
Sure. A large, retrospective study which accounts for and rebuts previous studies that show that vaccines/thimerosol/etc don’t cause autism, and which shows a strong correlation between a specific vaccine or vaccine schedule and autism while controlling for other factors. A paper demonstrating the mechanism by which the vaccine causes autism, which is replicated in animals and confirmed by independent reproduction of the results.
Don’t let the Big Aero shills control your choices and endanger you…
http://www.skeptic.com/carbon-comic/
To the author Jennifer Raff- I was surprised to see that human breast milk has higher levels of aluminium than the vaccines. So I checked your attached references and the numbers don’t add up at all. Human breast milk had a mean avg of .38mg. When you add up all the mg of aluminium in vaccines it is way, way more than that. Could you explain why you would write information that it’s not accurate?
Dr. Raff’s information is accurate. Your math is off, Emily. Let’s say your number is accurate (seems a little high to me, more like formula). That’s 0.38mg per liter, not total. Human breast milk is consumed in far larger quantities than the total vaccine dosage in a lifetime. Infant formula has even more aluminum than breast milk. Babies fed with either breast milk or formula will drink about 0.5 liters per day by the end of the second month, and even more later on. Let’s be conservative and say 15 liters per month, so 15 x 0.38 = 5.7 mg per month intake of aluminum, or 68.4 mg per year from breast milk. After introducing solid foods, that number goes up. At roughly 0.25 mg per dose, let’s say a lifetime of 100 vaccines (including flu shots, which many people refuse) that’s 25 mg per your lifetime. See http://www.chop.edu/service/vaccine-education-center/vaccine-safety/vaccine-ingredients/aluminum.html
You’re getting this basic math really wrong. What else are you wrong about regarding vaccines, that you are just as certain about but don’t even know?
Like Jerry says, you seem to be getting confused by mg/l for breast milk and mg/dose for vaccines. I would also like to point out that in her original piece Jennifer Raff writes: “But children consume more aluminum in natural breast milk than they do in vaccines, and far higher levels of aluminum are needed to cause harm.” So for you to claim she says “that human breast milk has higher levels of aluminium than the vaccines” is incorrect.
Cheers,
Rosewind
The author writes that alternative medicine is not science-based. Flat out wrong.
JR – why do you say it is wrong?
As a practicing nurse at a family medicine clinic, I have addressed a number of concerns raised by parents regarding vaccinations. Several of the posts provided excellent info that I will be able to use in order to more effectively answer questions & address concerns raised by parents. One point that I would like to make regarding vaccinations after reading one post by a parent whose child suffered a reaction after receiving a vaccination: there are several considerations in administering a vaccination, simple but important: did they person giving the vaccination wash their hands before and after & did they use the proper technique in drawing up and injecting the vaccine so as to prevent an infection from occurring as a result of introducing pathogens, as a result of a contaminated needle being plunged into the injection site?
Vaccines aren’t put through rigorous tests otherwise the Lymerix one that has caused many people many problems wouldn’t have made it to the market and then have to be taken off. Research that!
Lt,
You claim that Lymerix was removed from the market because so many people had problems with it. If I may restate that: People have problems with Lymerix caused it to be removed from the market.
If that is not what you are claiming, please help me restate your claim.
If that IS your claim, please cite the evidence (in peer-reviewed scientific journals) that Lymerix caused the problems reported.
What evidence convinces you that the causal relationship you have claimed is true?
What other possibilities have you considered, and what are the reasons that you rejected those possibilities?
What type of evidence would convince you that your current conviction is incorrect?
The articles in Nature (a premier science journal) in February, 2006 strongly suggest that there was no reasonable evidence that Lymerix caused the problems reported, but instead that unfounded fears of those unsubstantiated effects caused the vaccine to be unprofitable and that is the reason the company removed the vaccine from the market.
That’s right.
If the scientists writing in Nature are correct, fear mongering and hype and the threat of baseless lawsuits caused a corporation (not government, or the manipulated mass media, or some other conspiracy) to withdraw a working vaccine that would have prevented enormous suffering.
(The articles in Nature are behind a paywall, so if someone has free access links, please provide them here.)
The editorial and News Feature should be out from behind the paywall now-it typically is supposed to only extend two years from date of publication, this article was published in 2006. Here is the link http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v439/n7076/full/439509a.html
and the editorial:
When a vaccine is safe
Abstract
Unfounded public fears place pressures on vaccine developers that go beyond reasonable safety considerations, as the search for an acceptable vaccine against Lyme disease may demonstrate.
Nothing gets forgotten as quickly as the threat of an epidemic that has been successfully headed off. Just look at all the allegations of media hype over SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome), by people who think it was not a threat because so few ended up contracting it.
The short public memory reflects a low level of awareness of the largely invisible public-health activities that can now prevent infectious diseases running unchecked through human populations like they used to do — and as SARS might have done without the stringent quarantines and travel bans imposed to contain it. In wealthy countries, a lack of personal experience of infectious diseases has also induced a lack of respect for two of the main weapons that keep them at bay — antibiotics and vaccines.
Inappropriate use of antibiotics has allowed microbes to become resistant to many common treatments, creating serious health-care problems. And public suspicion of vaccines can undermine programmes aimed at eradicating particular diseases: the hostility in Britain to the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine, based on unfounded fears that it might cause autism, is a case in point (see Nature 439, 1–2; 2006).
Vaccination programmes often face problems of public acceptance as, by definition, they treat large numbers of healthy people. It is easier to provide a convincing case for vaccination when the risk of catching a disease is high and the consequences of infection severe. But what about a disease such as Lyme disease, where the risk of infection is relatively small, and the consequences not so deadly?
Lyme disease is transmitted by deer ticks, and is not transmitted person-to-person. The risk of infection is limited to areas where people share territory with deer, including swathes of central Europe and a growing envelope of rural and suburban North America. The disease is nasty but does not normally kill, and it can usually be cured by antibiotics. Confidence in the first Lyme disease vaccine stumbled after 1999, when it became available in the United States. A campaign claiming that the vaccine caused side effects, including autoimmunity (see News Feature, page 524), caused sales to plummet, and the manufacturer GlaxoSmithKline withdrew the vaccine in 2002.
So what does a vaccine maker have to gain from trying again? Baxter Vaccines, based in Vienna, Austria, must be asking itself this question. It has invested sizeable resources in developing a new vaccine, and is considering whether to put it into clinical trials. Baxter is not the only company seeking a Lyme vaccine, so manufacturers are clearly convinced that a potential market exists.
Those who live in areas where Lyme disease is spreading deserve a vaccine.
One reason for that is the growing extent of the disease, especially in the sprawling suburbs of the United States, where the number of cases in areas with systematic surveillance has doubled since the early 1990s. Good statistics are not available for Europe, but one study in eastern Germany showed the incidence up by one-third between 2002 and 2003. In Austria, the disease is endemic, with 130 new cases each year per 100,000 people.
Baxter will be hoping that increasing risk to the public will reduce the aversion to a vaccine. US physicians note that those keenest to be vaccinated tend to have first-hand experience of the disease and its unpleasant treatment, which involves weeks of injections with powerful antibiotics. Baxter’s candidate vaccine has been engineered to remove the part of a protein that the opponents to the vaccine held responsible for causing problems, even though the US Food and Drug Administration found no evidence for such harm.
It may go against the scientific grain for marketing considerations to play such a part in steering vaccine development. But in the real world, this may be unavoidable. Lyme disease is a serious illness and those who live in areas where it is spreading deserve a vaccine.
As a parent, I do believe in a parent’s intuition and judgment. But, I am not a doctor and I chose a doctor I trust and believe in and generally trust their suggestions. Frankly, I think parents sometimes give themselves and their intuition too much credit. I hear a lot of excuses like, “I think that many vaccines are too much on their little bodies” or “I think vaccines are probably bad”, but how do you quantify that? So many arguments are based on anecdotal reports and feelings more than medical research. But, of course, if and when things get bad, you turn to the only person who could possibly help and happens to be the person you should have trusted and listened to from the beginning. It’s just tragic.
You have written well, said everything I think needs to be said. A survey of the literature must exist. The Gates Foundation probably has one. Without it how can I propose to redirect the visceral opinions of the misinformed with nothing but the visceral opinions of the (I believe) well-informed. Meanwhile, I will post a link (found on FB) with a note that I have requested attribution. I am a retired scientific writer. Send me a link to the referenced scientific studies, and I will repost.
Unfortunately, we see here, once again a failure to understand the nuances of science. The media in our society likes to divide people into two groups – pro science or anti science. These are equally foolish positions. As a psychologist, I have extensive training in statistics and research methodology. While it may be true that vaccines have no link to autism, this has not been proven to be true. A major study asserting a link has simply been discredited. Dismissing something as false does not make the opposite true. An educated person examines each vaccine, weighing its risks and benefits. When risk of vaccination exists and the benefits can be achieved through behavioral education instead (e.g. Hep b is easily avoided), skipping the vaccination is a reasonable decision. When the risk of serious injury from vaccination is equivalent to the chance of serious injury from the disease, skipping the vaccine can be considered a reasonable decision. Obviously, there are vaccines where the benefits far outweigh the risks. In these cases vaccination can be considered a reasonable decision. Once again, let us consider that this is actually a complex issue that requires careful examination of not only data, but of the methods used to produce the data. There are many studies in well respected journals that would produce a chorus of laughter in graduate level statistic and research methodology classes. You just have to know how to spot them instead of considering all science as truth.
How would one “prove” no link, pray tell? Do we also have to prove that there is no link between exposure to solid foods and autism? After all, they also happen close in time, and there is no study “proving no link”. Should we all avoid solid food and go on a liquid diet, just to be “safe”? Proving a negative is a nearly impossible goal and not scientific. The people alleging harm have to show harm, and there is no such positive connection. What has been shown in study after study and meta-analyses of many studies, is that there is no statistically significant increase in autism when comparing people vaccinated with the MMR vaccine (or other vaccines, or thimerosal, or aluminum) versus people not vaccinated. Vaccines have been tested extensively- some were released, some were replaced with safer ones, and some never released. This question has been looked at by the CDC, by adult and pediatric medical associations, by public health experts in countries all over the world over two decades. How much *more* proof than in Dr. Raff’s last blog post will it take to convince you (if any)? Or have you set a knowingly impossible goal so you won’t have to back down?
One more question: This vaccine question is outside of your field, but you think it is okay for you (a non-expert in epidemics and immunology) and laypeople untrained in any scientific discipline to question and disregard professional public health experts. Can I also demand holding your profession to the same standards? How do you feel about Scientology denigrating your field? Do they have the same right to demand “proof” that psychology and psychiatry are completely 100% safe, as antivaxxers demand of vaccines? After all, I’m sure they have similarly strongly held feelings about the “risk” of psychology, have the same strong intuitions against it. Some have science or medical-related training, and can cherry pick flawed psychological studies as well.
Did you scoff? Does this question reflected back at you anger you? Then maybe you have a small clue why the same disregard of the profession of public health by people lacking training in immunology and epidemiology (and in some cases lacking any scientific background whatsoever) upsets people who work with vaccines and public health. Look up Dunning-Kruger effect, then look in the mirror.
Dr. O said “When the risk of serious injury from vaccination is equivalent to the chance of serious injury from the disease…”
When? Where? Citation needed. Seriously. I know of zero, no vaccines whatsoever where the risk is even 1/100 the risk of being harmed by the disease. I think you dramatically over-estimate your knowledge of the subject. (See Dunning Kruger effect.)
As far as I am concerned, vaccination is an organised criminal enterprise dressed up as disease prevention by means of junk science.
Here is some basic vaccination information I have compiled:
Basic vaccination information:
Explain how measles, mumps, rubella, polio, smallpox, and other diseases are no longer endemic to the US, and how the elimination of those diseases coincided with the implementation of vaccination. We didn’t all just start washing our hands 50 years ago. People didn’t develop antibodies to those diseases ex nihilo.
Joe,
Them thar’s fightin’ words!
At least I think they are. I don’t rightly know what most of ’em mean.
JK 🙂
Edwin, you are entitled to your paranoia.