Vaccines

[Ivellious]

So lately I have noticed a big rise in the number of anti-vaccination posts and pictures on my facebook page. I typically just don't pay attention to the kind of nonsense most of those posts contain, but recently one picture came up reading "Jesus would not want you to vaccinate your children." Now, I'm about 100% sure Jesus never said any such thing (and I'm mildly bothered by someone using religion to push a political agenda), but even so, the post got me thinking that it might be interesting to see what you guys think about vaccines and vaccination policies in general.

Obviously this is a fairly hot-button topic (at least in the US), with everyone from playboy models to Fox News hosts demonizing vaccines in every way possible. The recent news that the scientific study that started the controversy was completely made up by the researcher who conducted the study has done nothing to slow down the anti-vaccine movement. What do you think?

[RickD]

Ivellious wrote:
Obviously this is a fairly hot-button topic (at least in the US), with everyone from playboy models to Fox News hosts demonizing vaccines in every way possible. The recent news that the scientific study that started the controversy was completely made up by the researcher who conducted the study has done nothing to slow down the anti-vaccine movement. What do you think?

Do you have a link that talks about this study?

And pm me pics of playboy models...for research purposes.

[Ivellious]

Here are two articles talking about the "research" done linking vaccination to autism.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1 ... 3643960110

http://www.cnn.com/2011/HEALTH/01/05/autism.vaccines/

Long story short, in the 1990's this doctor in the UK wrote a paper saying that he found a link between getting vaccinated and becoming autistic. The paper was published in a prestigious medical journal and, of course, the media latched on and suddenly lots of people were concerned (if not outraged) about children being vaccinated. Over the years, the scientific community has since found no link between vaccinations and any sort of long-term health problems, including autism. But lots of public figures have still claimed that vaccines cause autism.

Fast forward to 2010, when it is discovered that the doctor who first claimed he found the link actually made up literally everything in the study, pretending to find a link when there was none to begin with. Turns out he was getting paid under the table by a group who wanted to blame something for skyrocketing autism rates and he decided to blame vaccines, specifically the MMR vaccine. Not to mention, the guy illegally performed most of his research, including taking tissue and blood samples from children without permission or informed consent. Oops.

[RickD]

Can't see the first link without subscribing. The second link looks like a "he said, he said" story. Does a red flag go up when you google "autism vaccines", or "vaccine deaths", and the majority of links saying vaccines are safe, are the very people promoting the vaccines?

I really don't want to get into the issue, but am I skeptical of the articles of any group that profits off of the products they are defending? You betcha!

I would tell people to do a serious study of the risk vs rewards of whatever vaccine they are thinking about. For example, take the flu vaccine. Is the risk of death from getting the flu greater than the risk from the flu vaccine? Each parent has to make that decision for him/herself. When your child gets injured or dies from a vaccine, the risk is 100 %.

This link talks a little about how vaccine death statistics given by the government, can be inaccurate.

[PaulSacramento]

Issues with vaccines are symptomatic issues of our western civilization.
Go to any place in the under developed world were people die by the 100's or 1000's from the very diseases we have gotten control of because of vaccination and ask them what they would do.
That said, vaccination is ALWAYS a risk.

[1over137]

Member of my family got vaccinated against flu and he got paralyzed. After year and a half of rehabilitations and exercising he now is able to walk by himself with crutches.

Also some small babies after vaccination are generally getting some problems.

I wish to ask, how is that possible? Isn't it possible to do some kind of tests to prevent complications and rather not to do the vaccination?

[RickD]

Issues with vaccines are symptomatic issues of our western civilization.
Go to any place in the under developed world were people die by the 100's or 1000's from the very diseases we have gotten control of because of vaccination and ask them what they would do.
That said, vaccination is ALWAYS a risk.

I'm certainly not making a statement against all vaccinations. I think we need to look at each vaccination on its own. I haven't looked into other vaccinations, but the flu vaccine, at least the vaccine here in the US, has ingredients that have made it easy for me to refuse the vaccine. Do all other vaccines have these kinds of toxic chemicals in them?

[PerciFlage]

I'm certainly not making a statement against all vaccinations. I think we need to look at each vaccination on its own. I haven't looked into other vaccinations, but the flu vaccine, at least the vaccine here in the US, has ingredients that have made it easy for me to refuse the vaccine. Do all other vaccines have these kinds of toxic chemicals in them?

Is the ingredient you are talking about in the flu shot mercury? More accurately the mercury contained in some vaccine preparations is a mercury-containing compound (technically called thiomersal/thimerosal but frequently referred to by antivaxxers as "that deadly, poisonous mercury"), the purpose of which is to act as a preservative for the vaccine and to prevent adverse reactions that can be associated with unpreserved (and past their shelf life, if you will) vaccines.

Thiomersal isn't used too commonly in vaccinations today, and not at all in childhood vaccines so far as I'm aware. This is partly because thiomersal became something of a bogeyman during the autism controversies of the late 90s/early 00s (it was easy for the antivax lobby to home in on something with mercury in its name), and partly because other, more effective and/or cheaper preservatives have been developed in recent years.

If you're not talking about mercury then all of the above may be irrelevant, but one thing to always bear in mind when looking into scare stories about vaccines is that "toxic" is relative. In almost every case, chemicals which are toxic only manifest their ill effects beyond some certain threshold, and vaccines which contain toxic elements will always (so far as I'm aware) have them in non-toxic doses because, as money-grubbing and shysterish as pharmaceutical companies indubitably are, none of them actually want to kill off their customers.

[PerciFlage]

PS - you may also be talking about Guillain-Barre syndrome, which is a truly awful and imperfectly understood side effect of some flu vaccines (at least I think it is limited to flu vaccines - it's at least possible to get the syndrome through becoming infected with flu). The only comfort most of us have here is that incidences of the syndrome are very low per number of vaccinations performed, and it's part of the risk-benefit analysis that needs to be done between not vaccinating people and the complications associated with the vaccine itself.

[pat34lee]

From what I have read about vaccines in many sources on the web, the risks far outweigh any possible benefits they give. The facts are that most immunizations have not been proven to do anything to stop the illness they are supposed to fight. The only ones that work actually make you sick, like giving chicken pox to prevent smallpox. Did vaccines cure polio? No. Polio disappeared around the world when farmers quit using DDT, whether a country's population was vaccinated or not. No vaccine has ever been tested by its maker for long-term health effects. That would cost money, and take away from the massive profits that mandatory vaccination gives them.

[Philip]

but am I skeptical of the articles of any group that profits off of the products they are defending? You betcha!

And so welcome to Big Pharma Inc - seems as if there's no malady that they don't have a drug solution for. The latest thing their pushers, er, pharmaceutical reps, are BIG-time pushing seems to be hormone replacement for both men and women. Wife post menopausal and a little moody? - there's a drug for that. A man's "drive" isn't quite what it was when he was 20 - yep, they have T-Replacement products designed to fix you right up. Scary stuff, this drug trade promotes (Side effects may include vomiting, diarrhea, kidney failure, vision and/or hearing loss, dizziness, shortness of breath, heart attack, stroke, etc, etc - did we leave ANYTHING out?)

Be VERY skeptical! While much is, no doubt, helpful, even crucial for the health of some, there's certainly a significant percentage that is mostly about making money and opening up new markets. And the doctors are prescribing many drugs based merely upon what the pharmaceutical company's literature recommends. Not exactly a healthy, unbiased source of info. Healthy people tend to have a healthy sense of skepticism!

[Alpha~Omega]

Let me tell you something about the process that is employed when creating, manufacturing, and transporting not only vaccines, but drugs as well.

My line of work is metrology.
Metrology is the science of measurement.
I calibrate the equipment used in creating, testing, manufacturing, and storing drugs and medical devices. Everything is strictly monitored from the time it is made, up to the time when it arrives at the hospital. If the chambers in which these drugs are being stored go out by a certain degree, the entire batch of said drug will be thrown out!

This is not the case when it arrives at the hospital/ doctor's office! It is thrown into some dinky little refrigerator that you can buy at walmart, something of which is not meant to store things that go into your body. This breakdown in the process causes many vaccines to be ineffective. They MUST be stored in a correct environment. What can I say? Hospitals are filthy, everyone knows that.

[RickD]

Philip wrote:
And so welcome to Big Pharma Inc - seems as if there's no malady that they don't have a drug solution for. The latest thing their pushers, er, pharmaceutical reps, are BIG-time pushing seems to be hormone replacement for both men and women. Wife post menopausal and a little moody? - there's a drug for that. A man's "drive" isn't quite what it was when he was 20 - yep, they have T-Replacement products designed to fix you right up. Scary stuff, this drug trade promotes (Side effects may include vomiting, diarrhea, kidney failure, vision and/or hearing loss, dizziness, shortness of breath, heart attack, stroke, etc, etc - did we leave ANYTHING out?)

Philip,

It's interesting that the one drug that actually helps men with low testosterone, testosterone itself, is relatively cheap. Maybe that's why they're pushing more expensive alternatives. Alternatives that aren't only more expensive, but either don't work as well as testosterone itself, don't work effectively, or don't work at all.

[Philip]

Rick, I'm the last guy on the planet to not appreciate the availability of modern medications. Heck, I wouldn't be alive without the year and a half of antibiotics I took to defeat severe, late-stage Lyme Disease. But Big Pharma is out of control! It's constantly looking for new markets for new drugs - and the more long-term use products it can develop, the better for their industry. As I used to do marketing for pharmacists in my state, I became aware of how often physicians' only detailed knowledge of various medications come from the drug companies' own literature. NOT good! That is an unhealthy relationship - especially as so many drugs build dependencies. Not to mention how medications are added on top of other ones, along with what dangers that presents.

But the whole hormone replacement marketing thing is particularly worrisome. You start messing around with a person's hormones and you can cause some very dangerous conditions. Plus many men with totally normal T levels still have sexual dysfunction, etc. But its marketed as totally safe, and almost as if it is some type of "magic bullet" treatment. (I've never needed nor had any experience with such a product, but I see it discussed a lot). It's marketed as if it is 100 % safe, but they can't know that.

[RickD]

philip wrote:
Rick, I'm the last guy on the planet to not appreciate the availability of modern medications. Heck, I wouldn't be alive without the year and a half of antibiotics I took to defeat severe, late-stage Lyme Disease. But Big Pharma is out of control! It's constantly looking for new markets for new drugs - and the more long-term use products it can develop, the better for their industry. As I used to do marketing for pharmacists in my state, I became aware of how often physicians' only detailed knowledge of various medications come from the drug companies' own literature. NOT good! That is an unhealthy relationship - especially as so many drugs build dependencies. Not to mention how medications are added on top of other ones, along with what dangers that presents.

Ok, I see where you're coming from now. And, I don't disagree. People take medications to mask symptoms. Then other medications are needed to mask the side effects of the first medication. It can be an endless cycle. And there's the dependency.

philip wrote:
But the whole hormone replacement marketing thing is particularly worrisome. You start messing around with a person's hormones and you can cause some very dangerous conditions.

Too many doctors practicing hormone replacement, really don't know enough to be practicing this kind of medicine. People have to look out for their own health, and find out the effects on their own. Because many times, the doctors don't have enough knowledge on this subject.

philip wrote:
Plus many men with totally normal T levels still have sexual dysfunction, etc. But its marketed as totally safe, and almost as if it is some type of "magic bullet" treatment. (I've never needed nor had any experience with such a product, but I see it discussed a lot). It's marketed as if it is 100 % safe, but they can't know that.

Testosterone itself, when taken properly, and with the patient consistently monitored by proper blood tests, has not shown to have deleterious effects. But the problems come when supraphysiological doses are taken long term, and other hormones, especially estrogen, aren't monitored and kept under control. Of course, those who are treated with testosterone who don't actually need it, may be harmed by it. But, testosterone regulates much more than sexual function. For example, cognitive function suffers with low testosterone.

Of course no medication is "totally" safe. One has to weigh the good and the bad with each situation. One should try non-medication methods before resorting to meds that can be harmful.