Apparently I am “broken”. My medical education means one thing…
That I am now officially in the claws of the medical system! Everyone tells me how incomplete my education is. From Chiropractors who tell me the spine is the heart of health (Including one who told me that spinal manipulation can control heart rates which is funny because the Vagus nerve controls the heart rate and that’s a Cranial Nerve). The Homeopaths tell me I don’t understand everything from water memory to quantum mechanics. The natural med people tell me that my asprin and morphine are no match for the power of natural medicine (Making me wonder if they even know what goes into these drugs). And my personal favourite is the notion that I don’t know how the various systems of the body interact with each other.
To which I respond with racuous laughter. Medicine is the study of the human body. We break up aetiology according to system but the effects of those causes are for the entire body. A clot in your leg could kill you through your lungs. A clot in your left ventricle could kill you via your brain. A tumour in your kidney could make your life dangerous via a hormone. A fracture to your leg could kill you via a fat embolism.
We know about the entire body. It’s why our course is 6 years long for a basic qualification and another 6 to 10 for a specialisation. It’s why our course is packed to the gills with classes and labs and clinics. The very notion that medicine is divided into systems is pure nonsense.
Well we really have to tell people these things because the current trend is that the anti-vax have dominated most of the familial websites under the notion of “safe spaces” to discuss these things. The issue here being that science isn’t a safe space, it’s a horrid world of theory eat theory and frankly anti-vax don’t have anything to stand on. It’s a form of quackery that appeals to people because doctors, journalists and magazines don’t think about the kind of message they send when vaccinating. Even pro-vaccine articles often show crying and unhappy children which influences parental notions to them. My patients REGULARLY terrify their children with the notion that if they don’t eat food the doctor will give them a “shot”. The pain associated with a vaccine is used to terrify rather than to show the reward of health.
So we have to cover arguments, even if we think they are stupid because you know… Parents google this kind of stuff and are often left wanting from pro-vaccine sides. It’s easy to deride this bullshit for what it is but it’s a lot harder to explain your stance considering the anti-vax absolutely thrive on the notion that “few people know anything about human physiology”.
So with that in mind? Let’s take a “common” set of arguments and show people why these are wrong. I am covering this one because this mentions the region where I work in as an excuse to NOT vaccinate.
Whats a vaccine, anyway?
We all understand that vaccine is the common name of a set of medicines renowned for saving humanity from sureshot destruction from incurable diseases. We have been told that the vaccine prepares the body by introducing a small amount of the disease causing germs so the body learns to fight the disease. But what is that formula that makes a vaccine, well, a vaccine, and why is there so much controversy over preventive medicine that has reversed humanity’s fall into the abyss of infectious disease and destruction? I’ll try and explain in this post, to the best of my abilities.
A vaccine is named after a infection that was seen in cows and people who worked around them. The earlier format was called variolation and was a method of protecting yourself against smallpox. It’s more than 2000 years old…
Vaccination is named after the “cow”. Or Vacha. Because the immunity to smallpox is the same as the immunity to cow pox. Hence the name.
There is absolutely no controversy over the efficacy of vaccines. They have been proven conclusively and repeatedly to work.
And it’s not introducing a “small amount of the disease”. It is introducing a small amount of killed or damaged or parts off the pathogen (the germ) that causes the disease. Every disease has causes and this targets the cause.
The active agent, aka the antigen
The goal of the vaccine is to deliver enough antigen into the body of a recipient so that the immune system recognizes the foreign object, aka the disease causing germ if it so decides to invade the body of the patient again. It is assumed , and by large accepted that the immune system of the patient remembers the disease causing organism and effectively fights it off , preventing disease.
An antigen is any lipid, protein or carbohydrate or any combination of the above (like glycoproteins or lipoproteins) that occur biologically that are recognised as not native to the body.
The immune system of the patient maintains memory T-Cells which can be physically demonstrated which last for years and sometimes decades maintaining a circulating titre of cells that can be easily reactivated in the presence of repeat infections of any foreign bodies that match the identified antigens. This is how our body normally fights diseases. The major effector on these are the antibodies produced by these lymphocytes (cells from the lymph). Think of them as a molecular specific poison.
It’s very very effective.
I normally demonstrate the power of antibodies and antigens through a little video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0d5Qx42vmQ
The effect is nearly instantaneous. Antibodies are powerful… but they take time to make by our bodies unless these memory cells are present.
So that’s it, a vaccine contains a small amount of antigen, that is about it, right?
Okay, now it gets a little more intricate. Thing is, you cannot put in enough antigen in a syringe and feed it to a subject and cause the immune system of the subject to produce antibodies without infecting the person. So you need something that will stimulate the immune system of the person without causing the target disase. So what do you do?
Inject it. Feeding it is just “stupid”. There is only a single oral vaccine.
You also have to preserve the antigen and prevent the solution from getting contaminated or denaturing. You also need to stimulate the immune system. You also need to keep any attenuated or live pathogens from regaining virulence and that requires other things to be added.
The Adjuvant
An adjuvant is a chemical that makes the immune system go on an overdrive. It accentuates the effect of the vaccine antigen. When the antigen and adjuvant are combined and injected, the body’s immune system produces much more antibodies than it would produce if the antigen were injected alone. What the antigen does is that it guarantees a better chance of the body producing antibodies to stave off the target disease. Essentially the adjuvant makes the body generate much more antibodies that it would have, without it.
No it does not. It does a variety of things ranging from adsorption to protection against contamination. It does not make the immune system go into over-drive. That is a gross over-simplification and an error. An overdrive immune system is an allergy and/or anaphylaxis which is a deadly and life threatening condition.
All it does is increase the chance that macrophages will consume the antigen and present it for antibody presentation. It increases the efficacy of the vaccine.
Cool, so our vaccine would contain the Antigen+Adjuvant, that is about it, right?
Somewhat. The above duo would be considered ‘active’ ingredients of the vaccine. But, you need an effective medium to keep them in, right? So you have excipients, a medium and a stabilizer – essentially ingredients that would make our vaccine uniform so that the contents don’t wary bottle to bottle.
Okay these are classified differently by this group of people. Yes you need mediums to maintain any live vaccines and stabilisers to maintain any killed ones from degrading.
Do we have our vaccine yet?
Well, almost. Now that we have concocted this amazing life-saving substance, we need to preserve it. After all, fungi, bacteria and random contaminants lurk everywhere. We need to ensure that microbial contamination should not take place in the above life-saving mixture, right? How to preserve stuff? Simple, add a preservative.
Sure thing! Otherwise microbial contamination could cause a deadly disease in it’s own right.
All vaccine contains a preservative
To ensure that the contents of a vaccine does not change over time, a preservative is added to the vaccine.
To stop the vaccine from spoiling… they contain preservatives.
So what’s the big deal? why is there so much controversy over vaccines
It has to do with people not knowing how they work and being told by people who don’t know how they work or how the body’s immune system functions that they work in bizarre ways.
Claim # 1 Vaccines induce an immunity by stimulating the body ‘s immune system to produce antibodies against a target antigen. The latter is definitely true. The problem is , we have just believed that because the body’s immune system develops an antibody, that helps the body fight the disease. While this claim has been established as fact in the minds of the vaccine promoters, and pretty much every body who believes in a vaccine’s ability to stave off a target disease, this has never been established through a trial. Basically, this claim has never been proved. As outrageous and absurd as it might sound, the idea that antibody production following a vaccine prevents or mitigates infection from the target organism has never been established through a trial. In fact, such a trial has never been designed. Whenever a vaccine has failed to work in the past, the outcome has never been to question the vaccine, but to come up with what is essentially an arbitrary timeframe of the vaccine’s effectiveness based on some statistical analysis. And the recommendation has been to add a booster of the vaccine to supposedly boost the immune system against the target disease.
1. You require two points to discuss a former and latter…
2. We don’t “believe” that antibodies help fight disease. We know. Go see the video on antibodies I posted up there. Blood testing functions on the same principle of immunology. The blood is destroyed in SECONDS by these antibodies. They are that potent. It’s why blood typing and matching is so vital. Antibodies are incredibly specific and efficient.
3. This claim has been proven. See the video. It’s also why tissue typing is so important in organ transplants. It’s how auto-immune diseases function.
4. The entire mechanism of vaccines has been well researched and is fact. By contrast the individuals who regularly claim otherwise usually belong to fields of pseudoscience that have no scientific basis what so ever or misrepresent actual science without knowing what it means in the hope that YOU won’t know what it means either. It’s like me telling you that if you buy this keyboard, it will linux your ubuntus and DOS your RAMs so well that your PC will be able to Apple Mac it’s Office to Windows 95 rather than Windows 7 or 8! These terms may mean something but their usage in this context is nothing but gibberish. The same thing applies to the anti-vax “quacks”. You may think the word “quack” is harsh but most of them couldn’t tell you how the human immune system worked.
Because their entire stance is dependent on the human immune system not functioning the way it does.
Claim #2 Vaccines are inherently safe
You walk into a Doctor’s office , the Doctor examines your kid, and the Doctor recommends a vaccine. Its not a vaccine that is Government recommended, but your peadiatrician tells you ‘Why take chances?’ – Sounds familiar. The subliminal context here is that the vaccine is safe , and that assumption is made both by the Doctor and the patient.
We don’t examine your kids and recommend a vaccine. If you are sick then chances are the vaccine won’t do anything. The only vaccine given prophylactically is rabies and that’s because the rabies vaccine has a high risk profile which makes it unsuitable for human usage. We also use it to vaccinate our pets eliminating the potential for rabies transmission there so we are safe. However if bitten by a wild animal we would be given the rabies vaccine as the virus travels slowly through neurons and our body can develop the anti-bodies before it gets to the brain and kills you.
The subliminal context here is “nothing”. It’s explicit. Vaccines DO have adverse effects. HOWEVER disease has more adverse effects than vaccines. The adverse effect rate for the MMR is 1 in 1000000. The mortality rate for Measles alone is 1 in 1000. And measles was once universal. Every year 800 to 1000 children died in the USA thanks to “harmless” measles. Tens of thousands were hospitalised and nearly all these kids had to pay for medication. Measles vaccines saved thousands of lives, reduced hospitalisations and saved parents money. To date there has been absolutely no link between the MMR vaccine and ANY of the side effects the anti-vax claims it provides.
In fact? Vaccination rates have fallen repeatedly yet Autism rates have risen. The incidence of autism is the same in vaccinated and the unvaccinated. In fact autism rates have risen due to improvements in diagnosis rather than anything else. There are autistic children in third world nations. They are just treated as “Weirdos” and “Lunatics”. It’s horrible.
But the majority of my readers do not live in such places and have access to the finest medical technology on the planet. It’s why their kids are given specialised care. It’s why they often go on to be “normal”. It’s why they go on to have long productive lives rather than simply being beaten until they conform.
We are literally blaming one of the finest inventions in medicine for the perceived epidemic and by preying on the fears of parents. All it has achieved is the resurgence of diseases among our children and increased deaths.
What is the issue then?
Both of the above claims have *never been verified*. That is a fundamental contention between the pro and anti sides of the vaccine debate. Nobody disputes the idea that a vaccine induces antibodies, at least in a good majority of the recipients. Whether this does help or not is pure conjecture. But unfortunately organized medicine places a premium on the belief that somehow the body learns to fight the disease because, duh , it has responded to the vaccine. There never has been a test that has proven that the vaccine prevents or mitigates the target disease in any way.
They have been verified. Every vaccine is tested against a placebo and has to show an efficacy rating in prevention of diseases. Smallpox was eliminated due to the vaccine. A disease that was set to kill millions every year didn’t suddenly vanish out of politeness.
Now the issue is that a lot of people on the anti-vax front LOVE a little graph that shows mortality falling. While vaccines affected mortality numbers they don’t affect mortality rates. What they do is the make the disease rarer. They reduce the incidence of the disease. Mortality dropped due to improvements in medical care. The incidence though? It remained the same. Vaccines dropped the incidence. Now what does this mean?
Medicines dropped the deaths.
Vaccines dropped the number of cases.
So why does the body respond to the vaccine
If you inject a mixture of chemicals and biological agents, it is but natural that the body will attack the invasive organo-chemical entity. Its downright absurd to *assume* without clear proof that the bodies’ response to the constituents of the vaccine indicates that the body is capable of fighting the target disease.
Except we have repeatedly proven that this isn’t the case.
(2R,3S,4R,5R)-2,3,4,5,6-Pentahydroxyhexanal is a commonly found chemical in our body. It’s often made by the body breaking down (2R,3R,4S,5S,6R)-2-[(2S,3S,4S,5R)-3,4-dihydroxy-2,5-bis(hydroxymethyl)oxolan-2-yl]oxy-6-(hydroxymethyl)oxane-3,4,5-triol. Now (2R,3R,4S,5S,6R)-2-[(2S,3S,4S,5R)-3,4-dihydroxy-2,5-bis(hydroxymethyl)oxolan-2-yl]oxy-6-(hydroxymethyl)oxane-3,4,5-triol is found in a lot of things including chocolate bars, coffee, tea, fizzy pop, cakes, biscuits and even something so common place as our sugar cubes.
Now (2R,3S,4R,5R)-2,3,4,5,6-Pentahydroxyhexanal if consumed in excess can lead to increased weight gain, ischaemic heartingl disease, stroke, myocardial infarctions, DVT, atherosclerosis, and hypertension. Diabetes, PCOS, Menstrual disorders, infertility, complications of pregnancy, birth defects and foetal deaths. It can also lead to meralgia paresthetica, migranes, carpal tunnel, dementia, intercranial Hypertension, multiple sclerosis, cancer, depression, obstructive sleep apnoea, asthma, gout, arthritis, back pain and poor mobility.
In some individuals who cannot control their intake of this chemical and who cannot process it correctly you end up with increased risk of disease, damage to the very structure of the arteries and veins, kidney failure, degeneration of the retina, localised sepsis and cataracts.
Yet we still eat this deadly chemical EVERY SINGLE DAY.
Relax…
It’s Sugar and Glucose. The point is when you give a substance a chemical sounding name you end up with people going “NOOOO NOT THE CHEMISTRY!”.
The fact of the matter is you are a living creature. You are also chemistry. Every single molecule inside you has a chemical sounding name. Just because something sounds fearsome does not make it so and indeed one can easily drum up fear through fearmongering as I have aptly demonstrated. Unless you knew what the two chemicals were you would be panicking about them and checking every single food stuff you have for them.
But… haven’t we eradicated diseases due to vaccines. At least that is what we have always learnt.
This is a very good demonstration of indoctrination at an early age. Generally we grow up believing as fact whatever we learn as kids. The following facts are very relevant here
- Most diseases ceased to be killers before mass vaccination was introduced
- Death rate from Measles, Mumps, Whooping Cough,Diptheria were down to a negligible number by the turn of the century.
- Small pox was not eradicated before mass vaccination. But there were entire villages which came down with many smallpox cases despite vaccination,whereas there were instances were unvaccinated people did not get the disease.
- Claims of Polio eradication are not valid. Publicly available statistics show that the number of paralysis cases actually increase when the number of Polio vaccines are increased.
1. Measles is one of the biggest killers of children in the world STILL. The fallacy here is that the anti-vaccine lobby fail to mention mortality rates. 1 in 1000 children will develop Measles Encephalitis. 15 to 19% of children with Measles will require hospitalisation to protect. Measles is one of the leading causes of deafness and mental retardation in the third world. The mortality rate ranges from 1 in 1000 to 3 in 1000. And the disease was near universal. Prior to the vaccine Measles killed more people across the globe than AIDS or Malaria. The disease was near universal and particularly fatal to those who have poor diets. In some cases Measles has shown a mortality rate of nearly 1 in 3. The 1 in 1000 to 3 in 1000 are “western” rates. To the anti-vax it is a harmless disease. Even today, Measles has the highest single pathogenic death toll (Pneumonia and Diarrhoea have more than one causative organism) with between 500,000 to 700,000 deaths per year. It onces used to be roughly 8 million. The vaccine has dropped it to this level.
2. That is true. Mortality rates had fallen. However the diseases were common place and they killed a lot of people by dint of mass infection. Also? They were unpleasant. 1 in 1000 is a small number… Until you remember that Measles WAS near universal. More than a 1000 children used to die every year in the USA to this “harmless” disease. Mumps? Mumps isn’t as deadly as Measles. 1 in 10,000 cases end in death. However it can lead to orchitis. It’s also can cause meningitis. It won’t sterilise your young boys but it will cause their sperm to become “lazier swimmers”. Whooping Cough is named after the peculiar cough characteristic of pertussis. It is your child gasping for air and painfully expelling it. It regularly causes respiratory failure in infants. Diptheria’s “olde name” was the Strangling Angel. No marks there for how it kills you (It forms a tough adherent membrane occluding your throat, literally strangling you to death). It used to have a mortality rate of 1 in 3. It require tracheostomy (a hole in your neck) to breathe. It’s NOT a “harmless” disease. You would have to be incredibly dishonest to claim such a deadly, painful and serious condition is “harmless”.
3. The smallpox vaccine provided a temporary resistance against smallpox. The vaccine was effective for 3 to 5 years and then it dropped in efficacy. So you could be vaccinated and still get the disease if you didn’t get a booster 5 years down the line. However the smallpox pathogen had a small problem. It had no known vector or reservoir in the wild. Some diseases like TB and Flu and Rabies are zoonotic and have reservoirs or wild populations of the disease. We are “incidental” targets. Smallpox only affected humans. If we could quarantine all known cases WHILE simultaneously vaccinating the entire population of the world and maintaining high vaccination rates we could basically starve Variola of all potential targets thereby causing the disease to go extinct. So we stockpiled a whole fuck tonne of vaccines and just vaccinated the entire planet simultaneously. The pathogen had no way of surviving since in the course of 10 years nearly every person had been immunised to the disease and so basically “ran out of food” and went extinct. The temporary nature of the vaccine didn’t matter as much as what we did in that 5 year period of protection (which was basically quarantines and vaccinations). It’s a true success story in the fight against disease. It’s frankly a shocking lack of education that people didn’t even read up to the basic nature of Variola before they made this argument because I learnt why the Smallpox Vaccine was able to be eradicated so successfully. The fact of the matter is that there are two other pathogens which are similar to this. Measles and Polio. Guess what? The two diseases were on course to be eradicated (Measles Mortality has fallen from 8 million to less than 1 million. Polio is entrenched in just 3 countries) and both diseases suffered a resurgence not because of the failure of medicine, but the rise of anti-vaccine lobbies and quacks. We can eliminate these diseases. The technology exists. We have done it once before. The problem is that we have to fight a lobby of people who genuinely have no idea about the things they hate. Point 3 proves it the best in this argument because I learnt that smallpox was eliminated due to the herd immunity by simultaneous vaccination as a child. India’s pulse polio vaccine scheme worked under this basis too. It was incredibly successful at stamping out polio. The sad fact of the matter is that Polio now only exists because of people like Islamic Fundamentalists and Measles is on the rise because of the efforts of the anti-vaccine lobby. To point out how effective it is and how embarrassing the anti-vaccine are… In 2010, the State of Tamil Nadu in India (A third world nation where poverty is high and resources are low) had 174 cases of Measles. It has a universal vaccination program and 60 million odd people in it. The UK also has 60 million people. In 2012 it reported 2000 cases of Measles.
4. The polio argument is one based on India too. India for a while lacked the technology to classify Acute Flaccid Paralysis. The Anti-vaccine lobby cannot differentiate between causes. Now the disease most characterised by AFP is Polio. So India just categorised all AFP cases as polio and treated them as such (because the treatment is the same. Iron Lung + Time). After the rate of AFP dropped to the point where India could test every single case it began to test for Polio. This broke up AFP into two groups. Polio Related AFP and Non Polio Acute Flaccid Paralysis. NPAFP is any AFP not caused by polio. In India what has happened is the polio related AFP has gone down while the NPAFP has stayed constant. However when the surveillance first appeared the number of NPAFP cases was 47,500. This number is repeated by anti-vax regularly as an indicative that polio vaccination doesn’t work rather than the reality which is disease classification in India works.
The Chingleput study, what is that?
About the only genuine population study done on vaccines happenned in Chingleput district in Tamil Nadu. The Government of India wanted to figure out how much immunity was provided by the BCG vaccine, since India was (and is) a Tuberculosis endemic country. About 300000+ people were followed up from childhood to adulthood. About a 1/rd received one variant of the BCG vaccine, another third another variant, and a third were never vaccinated. At the end of 15 years, the number of TB cases were tabulated from the three groups, it was found there was no significant variation either of the number of cases or the deaths.
There are other studies. The CDC keeps records for Measles vaccination pre and post vaccination. These are well known.
I work near Chingleput (Chengalpet) in Tamil Nadu.
The BCG vaccine doesn’t protect against infection by Tuberculosis since TB colonises the lungs as a primary complex and (usually) doesn’t cross the barrier into the body to trigger an antibody reaction. It remains there in a focus called “ghon’s focus”. The BCG vaccine doesn’t prevent a TB infection of the lungs.
It prevents Miliary Tuberculosis. Lung TB is inherently curable. Systemic TB is not. TB of the bone is still often treated by amputation. Tuberculoma of the brain will leave a caseous lesion in your brain causing everything from insanity to death. Miliary TB is the way TB kills in the modern era of antibiotics.
The Chingleput study proved conclusively that the TB vaccine doesn’t defend against TB infections of the lung but works at reducing the death rate from systemic tuberculosis. It’s why the BCG vaccine is considered compulsory in India.
Are vaccines safe?
Officially,all vaccines are considered safe and effective. That’s why they are in many vaccine schedules.
Relatively safe. They prevent deadly diseases but they do have side effects such as allergy and fever. Few people cannot have them. They have issues with their immunity and they are protected by the vaccines through the herd immunity which is the break up of the chain of transmission between individual to individual.
How is this safety determined?
Well the vaccine manufacturer submits the safety data to the authorities (FDA) and the FDA reviews it. This data is proprietary stuff, not tbe shared among the general public. But here are some interesting bits of information that can be verified with some help
Actually it’s shared with the public. You can find out safety information really easily. The FDA FORCES vaccine manufacturers to write up safety profiles for medications and these are published in a variety of papers.
Google it. Seriously? Don’t believe me. Check on Pub Med or any major medical journal site and you can find vaccine safety stats.
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The Measles vaccine is determined safe enough by the following way. Its injected into the hypothalmus of a group of rhesus macaques , and if a certain number of them survive, then its safe. And yes, if it fails once, apparently you can redo it till you get a successful result
The Measles vaccine has a serious adverse effect rate is 1 in 1,000,000.
There are 700 deaths a year from drowning in non-boating situations. The majority of which are in swimming pools. If the entire USA were vaccinated you would have just 300 adverse effects per generation of 70 years. Over the same period you would have 49000 deaths from swimming pool related deaths.
The Measles vaccine was FIRST tested like this and then tested on humans. When it proved to be safe we vaccinated people. And this scenario is highly unlikely because it is deeply unscientific. There were other tests. This would be a test to see if the attenuated virus could cause encephalitis.
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Mumps vaccine produced from the Urabe strain of the virus tends to cause meningnitis. However, this does not happen till beyond 21 days of the injection. So how is a mumps vaccine safety tested for meningnitis. Simple. The cut-off date is about 18 days or so. So if the Mumps vaccine recipient does not go down with meningnitis before 18 days, the vaccine is safe
In 1989 a nationwide surveillance of neurologic complications post mumps vaccine was conducted in Japan. It was based on the notification and the testing of mumps viruses cases. Viral isolates from cerebrospinal fluid were tested for the vaccine by nucleotide sequence analysis. (AKA detection of viral particles – Aseptic meningitis is called as such because you cannot culture any bacteria from it and cannot see the viral particles in it)
There were 630,157 of the MMR vaccine and out of these there were 311 cases suspected to be vaccine related. Out of these 36 tested positive. The high incidence was put down to an adverse media campaign where more people THOUGHT they had meningitis.
The incidence therefore 96 out of 630,000 odd cases. Or Roughly 1 in 6500 MMR vaccines resulted in aseptic meningitis where the disease was mild and with no sequelae. The incidence is the same between MMR and monovalent Mumps vaccine. It’s more common in males than in females. There were zero deaths, zero orchitis and no sequelae associated with meningitis.
What was worse was that out of 311 claimed cases only 96 actually had the disease meaning that 2/3rds of people who claimed to have meningitis were suffering from the placebo effect.
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A version of the Tetanus vaccine is determined safe, if , when injected into a bunch of mice, a certain percentage of them survive.
The tetanus vaccine is an toxoid vaccine. It is not given to protect against the bacteria but against the toxins it excretes. You basically are injecting parts of the toxin which can be recognised by the body and destroyed.
And a “certain” percentage is an “outright lie” here. In order to test the tetanus vaccine mice are injected with it. Then they are injected with the tetanus toxin and if only a few of them die then the vaccine is considered as effective. The survival against the toxin is what’s important.
So how come most Doctors and Paediatrician insist on so many vaccines
Simply because they are told to. Every country has a recommended schedule. Paediatricians are duty bound to recommend that schedule. In India, there are two separate schedules. The Govt sanctioned and subsidized official one is called the Universal Immunization Scheme. This includes the BCG, 3 doses of DPT , 3 doses of Polio (now the number of doses is much more than 3, thanks to the routine Polio Sunday’s that are held all the time)
The recommended schedule is devised by Social and Preventative Medicine experts using a variety of statistics about incidence and prevalence of diseases in the community.
In India there are two separate schedules. The Universal schedule is the bare MINIMUM schedule of vaccines to be undertaken and these are heavily subsidised or even free. BCG, Polio, DPT and Measles are the vaccines on this list. There is also a Pulse Polio program that causes transient spikes in immunity during January and February.
The other schedule is the ideal schedule which is followed by people who can afford vaccines and these include things like the flu vaccine, MMR, Rotavirus and HPV vaccines. These are not subsidised vaccines and are pricier so the majority of people do not get them. The simple fact of the matter is that the Government cannot afford them for 1.2 billion people.
There are a handful of vaccines. Anti-vax just count booster doses as individual unique vaccines rather than “the same vaccine given again”.
So how come we don’t have enough people questioning vaccines
Difficult to answer this one. There are two standard outcomes of regularly vaccinating children.
- There is some immediate reaction to the vaccine. Based on the vaccine it could be fever, or some infection following the days of the vaccine. Most parents are told that there would be some fever, and are encouraged to control the fever using standard fever medicine. So they tend to ignore it.
Our children face fever on a regular basis. The fever from vaccines lasts a day or two, breaks rapidly and is easily beaten.
That’s like suggesting that an itchy neck is a problem when using a seatbelt.
- Child frequently falls ill. In this case, parents have not really learnt to connect the vaccinations with the frequent episodes of illness of their child. One real problem is that there aren’t too many unvaccinated children around, so sometimes despite misgivings, parents tend to do what everyone else does - namely vaccinating their children with as many vaccines as they can afford, or what the Doctor recommends.
Except in every single case (bar one, Hannah Polling who had a rare mitochondrial disorder) there has been no link between chronic illness and the vast majority of children. The only thing that has occurred is the rise of vaccine preventable diseases in populations that were once protected by vaccines. The notion that there aren’t too many unvaccinated children is stupid considering the UK at this point has more unvaccinated children than the state of Tamil Nadu resulting in more measles cases there.
There is absolutely no connection between children falling ill and vaccinations. If anything children who are vaccinated are generally healthier and fall sick less often. It’s just that parents who don’t vaccinate have a cognitive dissonance where they ignore any diseases their child faces. So their child may have the Measles but it’s only the measles right? That’s not a real illness.
But why is a vaccine dangerous.
Simple. It contiains ingredients known and *proven* to be toxic and dangerous. I’ll just list 3 of them below
Oh joy…
- Thimerosal – A mercury compound. Used as a preservative. Damages the brains and can cause cancer. Officially they say the amount is too low to be unsafe. That is not based on any testing. A standard vaccine can contain 25micrograms which is above the limit for an adult (and its given to a small infant)
The earliest published report of thimerosal use in humans was published in 1931 (Powell and Jamieson 1931). In this report, 22 individuals received 1% solution of thimerosal intravenously for unspecified therapeutic reasons. Subjects received up to 26 milligrams thimerosal/kg (1 milligrams equals 1,000 micrograms) with no reported toxic effects.
Maximum tolerated doses not associated with death of the animals were 20 mg thimerosal/kg (rabbits) and 45 mg/kg (rats). That’s 20,000 micrograms per kilogram and 45,000 micrograms per kilogram. Assuming humans are at the lowest scale of this toxicity a baby would require 60,000 micrograms to harm. There are just 25 micrograms of thimerosal in our multi-dose pandemic flu vaccine (AKA the yearly flu shot).
The safety limit for an adult is 25 miligrams or 25,000 micrograms. This statement is a massive mathematical fail. It is like saying that your house is 10 metres away rather than 10 Km away. The error is astronomical.
- Formaldehyde - Used as a preservative, and to *weaken* strains of the disease causing organism.
There is more formaldehyde produced in your body as a precursor to DNA and RNA than in a vaccine. In addition? Pears contain hundreds of times more formaldehyde than in a single vaccine. And I really hope you don’t like beer because that’s a formaldehyde problem too.
I have spent hours in rooms filled with formaldehyde used to produce cadavers and probably inhaled vast quantities of the preservative. It’s harmless if you don’t chug it.
- Aluminium Hydroxide. – Used as an adjuvant. Also a known toxic compound, Aluminum has been linked to Alzheimers’ among other things
The primary ingredient of all antacids is aluminium hydroxide. Again, remember what I said about toxicity earlier.
Aluminium hydroxide is consumed in grams in our antacids. Yet suddenly a few micrograms (1/1000000 of a gram) is deadly?
Aluminium hydroxide has no link to Alzheimer’s disease. The claim was made in the 60s and disproved in the 80s yet Anti-Vax hasn’t gotten that message. Aluminium Hydroxide is readily excreted in urine too.
But , if you can show that vaccines are unsafe, the you could sue the vaccine manufacturers, right?
No, most countries have passed legislations that explicitly absolve anybody involved in the business of delivering vaccines (manufacturers, doctors, nurses- anybody in the chain) from any civil or criminal damages.
Actually because malpractice suits are regularly lost by people who sue for side effects of medication. If that were the case then we could sue Silver Spoon for it’s deadly deadly sucrose.
The vaccine when it functions normally is safe. In some individuals it has side effects. In some individuals it has major adverse reactions. We don’t know until we have TRIED it out. Once we detect the major adverse effects we stop vaccination and you go onto the list of people who are protected by the herd immunity rather than the vaccines (travel is a nightmare).
The reason for this is that the cost of vaccines would RAPIDLY increase if manufacturers were held responsible and doctors would charge for vaccines as they are taking a risk. With this regulation any claims on vaccine damages are submitted (I assume this is the USA) to a Vaccine Court that pays out from funds from the state rather than forcing the manufacturers to pay or doctors to pay out which would cause those bodies to simply recuperate their costs through their products and services. If you are planning to sue me for x amount of money for your fever caused by vaccines then I am going to charge all my patients an appropriate amount of money to cover for such eventualities. And while people think I worry about my patients you have to remember that I would be helping fever patients from a position of bankruptcy.
And you would have to show vaccines as being ineffective and unsafe. Which they aren’t. The closest argument this article has made is about the BCG vaccine where it only told “halt” the story and ignored the actual reason for vaccination.
*Disbelief* This sounds so conspiracy theorist
Given the nature of the issue, that is rather unfortunate. There is enough data for you to dig into , to make your own decisions. You don’t have to believe anybody in any side of the debate. Given the facts that I have detailed above, your best bet is to do some research on your own. But please be vary of emphatic statements without any data to back it up. Whatever I’ve posted here is verifiable.
The fact of the matter is that the author of this fair piece didn’t even know what the BCG vaccine was given for yet wrote an article that was set to (dis)inform you.
There is no debate. Science doesn’t work by debate. We don’t sit around and debate whether the world is a sphere or if the Earth revolves around the Sun. Science works through evidence and so far all the evidence is on our side. Vaccines are considered one of the most cost effective and rapid ways of disease control. In the Italian outbreak, the cost to the state from “Harmless” measles was 22 Million Euros. It could have easily vaccinated around 1.5 million people for that amount of money. 5000 cases of hospitalisation cost the equivalent of 1.5 million vaccines.
There has been absolutely no evidence of any of the claims of the anti-vaccine lobby. Most of them cannot even explain how the human immune system works let alone how the vaccine functions. Only one anti-vax individual has managed to tell me how the human immune system worked.
And the irony of that situation was that they went online and googled it. Then copied and pasted it.
Word for Word. They didn’t even check who wrote the article. The people who want you to not vaccinate have no grasp of human biology and either are speaking as mothers (an euphemism for saying things with the notion that possession of a child gives you the innate ability to understand your child’s biology), speaking from positions of ignorance or worse.
Speaking from positions where they can benefit from you monetarily and repeatedly. A lot of the anti-vax brigade belong to quack practices such as homeopathy or chiropractic. Exclusive access to you and respect as a “real doctor” means they have you for life since the basis for their “cures” are that you can take as much of the treatment as you damn well feel like since it doesn’t do anything but makes you feel “nice” because of the placebo effect and because of the massage.
They will sound “better” than a doctor because they seem to provide a more personal care scheme and their “medicines” don’t seem to have any side effects (they don’t have any effects either) but would you like to know something interesting? The vast majority of us work the same way. Your birthdate doesn’t affect what kind of person you are. I have seriously heard such quacks refer to the four humours principle which was disproved more than a century ago. But it sounds mysterious and cool so patients lap it up. They pretend to be a doctor. They wear the white coat that no one in the west wears and often use our stethoscopes. Yet I have never seen a Chiro or a Homeo ever take a BP test or test blood. I have never seen one shine a light into a human eye. I have never seen one elicit a reflex and I have never seen one even suggest that these are important tests.
Yet people still go to them because they have one thing many doctors do not have which is TIME. Time in which to build a rapport with their patients and indeed increase the level of trust in what is in effect plain water and back cracks.
Vaccines work. That’s all there is to say on the matter.