In which I heartily approve.
Yes. Yes, yes, yes. Yes.
If you’re not familiar with the details of the good doctor’s story, Dr. Wakefield is the guy who published the shoddy research that led thousands of people to believe that there was a link between certain vaccinations and autism. I say ‘shoddy’ because The Lancet retracted the paper soon after it was published (the research was bad and no one could replicate the results) but people continued to believe the results anyway. Long story short, the kicker is this: Dr. Wakefield’s research was paid for by lawyers for parents seeking to sue vaccine makers for damages. The anti-vaccines guy? Was one of them. A guy who didn’t mind doing unnecessary tests on children to get a big paycheck. A big pharma asshole with low morals and a lust for money.
Actually, go read this comic. It’s informative. It’s awesomesauce. It’s just plain easier. I’ll wait here.
Okay, are you back now? Great. Allow me to go off for a minute: I’m totally and completely pro-vaccination, even though I know that once in very, very great while there’s some kind of complication. Why accept the risk? Because vaccination WORKS. If you don’t believe me, go look it up. Look at juvenile death rates by disease for the past century, correct for nutrition and education, and then tell me that you really don’t think vaccinations work.
And if you can’t read, go ask someone over eighty: they’ll tell you right to your face that kids “just don’t die as much as they used to.” (G’ma told me that when she was a kid, “everybody knew someone who had lost a child to illness.” I personally know no one who has lost a child to measles, TB, smallpox, mumps, rubella, or polio.)
And it’s not because those germs just went away on their own, people. More kids survive childhood because of the use of vaccinations. Period. This is not a belief, it’s a fact. If you think vaccines cause [insert latest paranoid scare], go find the research to back up your assertion before you let your offspring become a disease vector in the middle of the culture I live in, thank you very much, because many of my own vaccinations are really quite old and I deserve to live somewhere with herd immunity.
In the autumn of 2008, some areas of the U.S. had school populations in which 10% or more of the children were un- or under-vaccinated. “We’ve already dropped below the level of vaccine coverage where herd immunity exists for some diseases,” said Dr. Paul Offit, chief of infectious diseases and head of the vaccine institute at Children’s Hospital in Philadelphia. “At some point, we’re going to be forced to decide whether it is an inalienable right to catch and transmit potentially fatal infections.”
Kids are now suffering from outbreaks of things like measles and – get this – whooping cough because their parents have skipped their vaccinations. The world is small. People bring germs back from overseas all the time. How bereft would you be, seriously, if your child got sick and died from a disease like that? A disease that was, in the not-too-distant past, virtually wiped out? A disease that is preventable?
Remember, before the vaccine was introduced in 1963, measles used to kill on average of 400 kids each and every year. Measles! I’ve never even seen a case of measles. (And, after googling the disease and catching some images, I’m glad.)
If you surf the anti-vaccine web sites, you’ll notice that most of the cited research isn’t linked. The claims that unvaccinated children are “healthier” are unsubstantiated because there’s no such condition. (As far as the medical sciences are concerned, either you’re healthy, i.e. free of disease, or you’re sick. Of course there are gradations – the kid whose mom feeds him a balanced diet and who runs around outside is going to be less likely to have behavioral and emotional problems than the kid who lives on junk food and never leaves his computer – but even if it seems counter-intuitive, there’s no proof that one is more likely to survive a deadly infectious disease than the other. And a slightly better first-world diet is not going to produce an immune system incapable of catching a deadly infectious childhood disease.)
Such sources are rife with emotionally-phrased speculation about how the medical and pharma establishments just want to make money off of selling vaccinations, as if the act of making money immediately means that there’s no reason for vaccinations in the first place. I’m not even going to bother to point out how utterly irrational that kind of argument is, because it’s so irrational it can get your kids dead.
And for what? Are you really going to feel good about sticking it to the man as you bury your kid?
I mean, think about it. Vaccines work. There is no evidence that any kind of vaccine is linked to autism or any other condition. The people we think of as “them” have children too, and they get their babies poked with needles full of the same stuff: it’s in NO ONE’S interest to continue producing and selling any vaccine that harms or kills, not even for money.
Vaccination works. If you don’t believe me, look it up.
Sources:
Thousands of unvaccinated children enter schools
Demographics of Unvaccinated Children
Unvaccinated Children at Center of Measles Outbreak
The ‘herd’ doesn’t protect unvaccinated children
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Me and my 3 siblings all had chicken pox, mumps and MEASLES together. I was loathe to vaccinate my child for diseases I lived through, but I did. She survived.
It seems that getting one’s kid stuck with needles is worse for the parent than the child! -m
My kids all had whooping cough and chicken pox and something we think may have been mumps. I kept them home so they would not infect others and it was a long haul–especially the whooping cough. But I am still glad we did not vaccinate.
Years before we had kids, our cat had a vaccine reaction (his face swelled up and he had trouble breathing)–and that made me question vaccine safety.
Looking into current health issues, I felt that the biggest health problem facing kids in developed countries was not communicable diseases but immune system problems. I reasoned that it did not make sense to permanently preoccupy an immune system–it needed to be flexible, adaptable and well-supported.
Interestingly, when chicken pox went through town I spoke with one mom whose 2 kids had both been vaccinated for it and both been exposed. One got it and one didn’t. So for her family that vaccine was only 50% effective. And let’s hope that the vaccine in the chicken-pox-free kid doesn’t wear out, oh, ever. Because older kids and adults are generally SO much more miserable with chicken pox than young kids are. Pushing a relatively benign disease into the adult population, where it is much more difficult to deal with, is a very real risk with the chickenpox vaccine.
Of course this mother’s experience made me question vaccine efficacy. And I questioned it again when I noted that my grandparents got the flu vaccine every year and also were in bed with a bad flu every year…. Anecdotes may not be considered evidence, but they sure can make you think.
I’m sure you are familiar with the idea that diseases themselves have life cycles. The incidence of particular diseases rises and falls for reasons we don’t fully understand. And sometimes diseases do just die out. So, in the case of a disease, such as smallpox, that begins to decline and then continues to decline after a vaccine is introduced and finally dies out–what are we to conclude about cause and effect here? What caused that disease to die out? How can we really know? I don’t, but I do know what the vaccine manufacturers will say.
None of this excuses shoddy research funded by interested parties. I can’t speak to the quality of Dr. Wakefield’s research, but of course, this guy is not the only one paying for his research with dollars from interested parties. Just look at all the research funded by drug companies! They research their own products and then we take their word on it. How much sense does that make?
And really, if you hold a view contrary to the established one and the only acceptable argument is a scientific study, what recourse do you have other than funding your own study?
I love you madly, but I’m just sayin’.
(Note: I forgot your kids weren’t vaccinated! This post was not written to insult you. I love you!)
You’re sayin’ that you saw an ineffective vaccine… once. (Vaccines are not considered to be perfectly effective. Research suggests that the pox may have been worse if that child hadn’t been vaccinated at all.) You saw a reaction once… in a pet. (If I recall correctly, they’re built differently.) I’m just sayin’ that if vaccines were truly dangerous or wholly ineffective it would have been conclusively proven by now. Yes, The Man is evil, but the persons who do this research have children of their own.
Also, sure, diseases do die out, but the preponderance of evidence shows that vaccines have virtually eradicated a whole host of childhood diseases. While correlation does not imply causation, populations who have been vaccinated at a high enough rate to have herd immunity do find that the disease goes away. Are you really arguing that it’s likely, or even possible, that a host of potentially fatal childhood diseases just happened to die out right after the whole population was vaccinated against them? Really?
You concluded that the issue wasn’t communicable diseases in this country precisely because vaccinations had eradicated many of them. Your conclusion that immune system problems are caused by vaccination is, according to the evidence, apparently an erroneous one.
Naturally, for any person with a heart, it does seem counter-intuitive that poking a child with a needle and assaulting his little immune system with a bug actually confers immunity, but it does. Research is showing that immunity issues like allergies are higher in populations that are exposed to fewer bugs: country kids have fewer allergies than city kids, and third world kids have fewer allergies than first world kids. The human body is smart; exposing it to stuff makes it stronger. All those psycho moms who use anti-bacterial products all over their homes end up with offspring who spend the entirety of their first Mexican vacation in a hospital bed with an IV drip because they can’t resist the local germs.
We’ll cheerfully agree to disagree! -m
Alright, I’ll resist the urge to go point and counter-point with you on this, because believe me, I could. This was something we thought about and discussed for years before making a decision. Plenty of non-vaccinators are really not the rabid, illogical fear-mongers they get painted as. I know that for me it just came down to choosing the set of risks I preferred.
Interestingly, mdh was never vaccinated either.
1.) Okay!
2.) I don’t think non-vaccinators are rabid. I think they’re {redacted}.
3.) Who’s MDH? -m
Have some sympathy for people with autistic children. There is so little help out there. They are desperate and will try anything, but at the same time are afraid to make a step for fear of repeating something that they may be able to prevent. Many families with autistic children will tell you that their child started their withdrawal shortly after their MMR vaccine. It’s a tough call for a parent when considering vaccinating the next child. What if the vaccine does cause autism (maybe just in my family)? Why risk it.
Also, the resurgence of these “3rd world” diseases in our public schools is largely due to illegal immigrants crossing the border from Mexico.
I don’t know about Washington, but in TX, your child is not allowed in public school without their current vaccinations.
I have deep sympathy for parents of autistic children, and I can also see how ‘correlation does not imply causation’ wouldn’t hold water if your kid appeared to withdaw, as you said, immediately after a shot. I would guess it’s a typical age for symptoms to appear.
If you read the linked articles, it seems that millions of kids get into school without vaccinations when their parents claim it’s a religious exemption.
And yes, EXACTLY: eradicating a disease in one country doesn’t mean you’re not going to run into those germs because Nature doesn’t give a shit about borders. Immigrants, world-travelers: looking at a flu map shows how much churn there is worldwide. -m
I am in complete agreement with you on the vaccination issue. I know it’s a hot topic, but vaccinating works.
I too have sympathy for anyone who has a child with autism, or any other condition, for that matter. Nevertheless, I have tremendous sympathy for the parent whose child’s vaccination series is incomplete and consequently contracts one of these illnesses because the carrier was still asymptomatic. By the time someone is keeping their obviously sick kid home so as not to infect others, it’s possibly, perhaps even likely, already too late.
This is one of those issues where I have a real problem with squaring my belief in individual rights with what is best for the population in total. I must say, however, when your rights are impacting others’ rights to a best shot at good health, you’ve stepped over a line.
For example, I believe it’s right that people can’t smoke in public any more (yes, I smoked for 17 years, but I wouldn’t even do it on the smoking porch at restaurants if those around me were not also smoking, or were trying to eat even if they were previously seen smoking; it was my “right” to be discourteous in that sitch, but I never felt quite entitled enough to be such an inconsiderate prig).
Ask someone who doesn’t vaccinate their kid, and who also doesn’t smoke, how they would feel about sharing a flight sitting next to someone who chain smoked for the duration of their trip. I want to sit next to a kid who hasn’t been immunized for chicken pox about that much. And I’m far less likely to contract lung cancer than chicken pox on the five hour flight from ATL to LAX.
Excellent points, my dear. I like the doctor’s quote: “At some point, we’re going to be forced to decide whether it is an inalienable right to catch and transmit potentially fatal infections.” -m