Childhood Vaccinations – Necessary or Overkill? Sequal Thread

From the story you cited: Cancer deaths are down across the board, and have been dropping for 20 years.Cancer deaths have been dropping by 2.1% every year since 2002.

So if your GP does not have any evidence to base this statement on, why do you believe it, not to mention, why does your GP believe in it?Without knowing any reasons to believe a statement why should anyone believe in it?We sometimes accept statements form authority, because we cannot know everything, but if a GP says, this works, but there is no evidence that it works, then I'm sorry but that's just not an authority I would choose to believe in. Yes you do seem very entrenched. What I wonder, and I guess many others as well, is what made you so entrenched in your beliefs?Your argument seems to boil down to the fact that we cannot rule out with 100% certainty that there might just maybe be some downside to vaccinations.Well I know for sure that there are downsides to not being vaccinated, and I know there is no indication of any long term ill effects from vaccination. The minute someone shows vaccination is worse than no vaccination, then I'll reconsider.

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Any and all medications have risks.

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Agreed

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Furthermore, adverse reactions to vaccines come in more than one flavor:

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Agreed and so do people.

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Public tolerance of the risks associated with aspirin is high.

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Aspirin is not mandatory and is irrelevant to what I said in Message 234.

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Perhaps you'd like to provide evidence of the first sort: caused by the vaccine itself.

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Now that would be a fruitless effort wouldn't it?Either you agree or don't agree that anomalies should be provided for if we don't want vaccines to be withheld from children.

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Why must we conclude that these diseases are the inevitable result of ageing?

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Nobody said that, though the evidence shows that age is a factor in these diseases sicne they take a rather long time to develop.What I said was that people died of things like infectious disease and childbirth before they had a chance to live the thirty more years it takes to develop heart disease and cancer.

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That as a person ages they can expect to be more prone to Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, type II diabetes, depression and so on?

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Our bodies wear out, LL. If childbirth or an infectious disease doesn't get you first.No comment to the following?

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I seem to end up saying this at the end of most threads but everyone here seems pretty entrenched in their views.

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You are certainly "entrenched" in your views.What we keep crying for is good quality evidence for those views.You have yet to provide any.I am more than willing to consider any good quality evidence that what you claim is correct, but don't expect me to change my mind without good quality evidence.It may be easy for you to believe in whatever makes you feel good, but I require much more than that.

Let's try a new tack.Child car seats are mandatory.Child car seats have caused deaths.Should child car seats therefore be optional?

I just stumbled across a vax blog that has a quiz for Antivax Hysterics.The Millenium Project – 404 page not foundIt's like the guy's been eavesdropping on the conversation here!

Lindalou, this one's for you.The Anti-Immunization Activists: A Pattern of Deception Dr. Friedlander has taken it upon himself to show in nauseating detail how Antivax Hysterics misuse scientific literature.You will note he is sympathetic to "alternative" medicine. So he should have some street cred in your book.

purpledawn responds to me:

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If the 1% feel that any vaccine(s) or a specific ingredient of any vaccine(s) causes or contributes to a lifelong disability or death, then vaccines and protocols need to be developed to accommodate that 1% if we don't want people to abstain from vaccines.

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What makes you think they aren't? Medicine is on the lookout for those who have adverse reactions to vaccine from simple irritation at the injection site to things like going into anaphylactic shock. I just got my flu shot for the year and my doc spent a couple minutes massaging my shoulder so that the vaccine would get worked in and I would have a reduced risk of soreness at the injection site.

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IOW, their concerns need to be addressed and not pushed aside as acceptable "losses".

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And where on earth does anybody think people dying from vaccine due to any cause is "acceptable"? Why do you think the Sabin vaccine for polio has been abandoned for the Salk vaccine in the United States? Because the Sabin vaccine sometimes actually caused polio! There are a lot of factors involved in why certain vaccine formulations are used but one of them is whether or not it's safe.

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Even if the studies aren't conclusive either way, the issue is still there and something is needed to meet the needs of the 1%.

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But that's just it: The studies ARE conclusive. It's just that people don't like the outcomes. If you're absolutely certain that your kid's autism was caused by his MMR vaccine, are you really going to be swayed by actual evidence that it wasn't? There is autism. There are vaccinations. For some people, there's no way to ever disconnect the two. It seems that the only way they could ever be convinced that there isn't any connection is if we were to suddenly stop vaccinating everybody and the incidence of autism were to vanish.

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When those voices are pushed aside, especially in this day and age, they will go to the public since the squeaky wheel gets the grease.

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"Pushed aside"? Where are they pushed aside? Sometimes people are wrong. We have this idea that somehow we need to be "fair and balanced" and "respect other people's opinions" as if simply because somebody has a contrary thought means he is just as justified and rational. Some claims are simply wrong and to treat them as legitimate or if there is any controversy over it is to lie to people and make the problem worse.It isn't that you cannot question the status quo. It's that you have to have evidence in order for it to be taken seriously. There are dumb questions.

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For the average individual safe and effective means it is harmless and it will always work. So when something seems to cause irreparable harm, there is outrage.

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And that's understandable...but still wrong. How do you convince someone that their child's autism isn't from the vaccination? What would be sufficient evidence for them to say that they were wrong?

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So if it is dangerous for even one child to abstain from vaccines, then the anomalies need to be provided for.

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See, you just did it! "Dangerous for even one child"? What on earth does that mean? Are there complications from vaccination? Yes. But autism? No. There isn't any evidence of vaccination causing autism.What does it take for it to be convincing that vaccination doesn't cause autism? Would the only sufficient evidence be complete abandonment of vaccination for two generations and see if autism vanishes?

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Rrhain

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Thank you for your submission to Science. Your paper was reviewed by a jury of seventh graders so that they could look for balance and to allow them to make up their own minds. We are sorry to say that they found your paper "bogus," specifically describing the section on the laboratory work "boring." We regret that we will be unable to publish your work at this time.

I looked at the two recent links you provided here, and then decided I'd see if I could verify the information I gave here concerning the smallpox vaccine which you dismissed as BS. If this information were not available from any other source then it would be telling, but I found it again on a mainstream web encyclopedia site. This is a straightforward information site, not an anti-vac or an alt med one. Smallpox vaccine: does it work?This article repeats much of the information from the other one, and more. It also gives evidence that syphilis in children was spread by the smallpox vaccine, and that leprosy was also spread by it. Leprosy was unknown in Hawaii, there was no word in the language for it, until European vaccinations were introduced there.In attempting to think the way I used to think, when I allowed vaccinations for myself and my daughter without question, I believe this article would have raised some concerns and caused me to do more research. Remember, this is not an anti-vac site. I would ask everyone here to have a look because I think it does pose some interesting questions.It also mentions that the diagnosis of an illness can be changed, and this can have an impact on statistics. I'd like to shift the focus to polio here for this. I've seen a number of sites talk about how the diagnosis of polio changed pre- and post- vaccination. I have again attempted to find one that is not exclusively anti-vac or alt med. This site goes into more detail. Back to the question I asked recently: How likely is a doctor to diagnose the presence of a disease for which a person has been vaccinated, especially if it is a mild form? This exctract, along with the smallpox history, puts a question mark over the official disease statistics and their interpretations. You may still choose to disagree with me, but I hope this shows that the concerns I have are not baseless, unsubstantiated paranoia.Upon re-checking the smallpox citation from the encyclopedia site, I see it was written by a source you probably would not accept, as he is an alt med practitioner. Here is a link to an article in JSTOR that originally appeared in the Journal of Contemporary History titled "The History of Smallpox Vaccination in Germany: A First Step in the Medicalization of the General Public. I do not have access to it, though I would be very interested in reading it. Perhaps you do, and could present a few of its salient points? This is one of the places that had high smallpox vaccination rates in 1871 but also high incidences of cases and deaths.Edited by LindaLou, : No reason given.Edited by LindaLou, : No reason given.

Har har indeed. He's repeating things he's heard from people who oppose vaccinations, purely without comment. If he thinks the claims are ludicrous to the point of being laugh-out-loud funny, then I'd like to see him sagely explain why he's right and we are wrong. It's also a favourite tactic of creationists like Kent Hovind to present evolutionist claims and poke fun at them without any substantiation.Edited by LindaLou, : No reason given.

My comments were very generic. Not an all or nothing issue.

I am sorry that I apparently am unable to write so that you can understand my point.In the posts you recently replied, I did not imply that vaccines should be optional.

Only 16 posts left until End of Thread.

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It is a good time to start winding down and presenting summaries, conclusions, or final comments.

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Thanks for debating, carry on. Edited by AdminPD, : Better Version

I've had a look at what this doctor credits as plausible re. alt med. I would call him a skeptic to a large degree. I think my own GP, who has some faith in traditional Chinese medicine, is more open to alt med, though no one would class him as an ND.This is also reflected in his comments about the vaccination sites. I'm not familiar with the sites he's listed, but he obviously has a point about people being sloppy and sometimes deceitful when they are propagandising. He's also got a point about some sites making assertions or claiming "a study shows", without citing the study. And I think an intelligent person is right to be dubious about this kind of information. What it would do, for me, is to lead me to do more research and look for claims that actually are backed up by more credible evidence. Having said that, then I am also not willing to take mainstream studies and statistics at face value.This doctor is not someone I'd trust to interpret that kind of evidence for me because he is clearly convinced that vaccines are overwhelmingly beneficial. It's a little like Stephen Barrett and his crusade to discredit alt med. A few of his claims: Children back then were also not receiving upwards of 30 jabs.He mentions later on, in critiquing a paper: There's no puzzle here. The point the paper was making was that these diseases became less prevalent through good preventative measures and not through vaccines. If a vaccine had been available for the black death, then I would be surprised if the vaccine weren't heralded as the miracle cure for the disease. It, too, disappeared without.I thought this article raised some interesting points, but I thought the articles I cited earlier here raised some too, especially the smallpox history. When claims seem to run counter to each other, and both use statistics, it can be a difficult job trying to tease out the truth. I still think that there are many questions about vaccines that need answering, and that the number of vaccines given to children today -- especially in the US -- is cause for concern.