Dear Parents, You are Being Lied to By Living Whole

The Anti-vax lobby is under fire. I have long stated that the anti-vax lobby had it’s success due to the success of medicine.

See, we made diseases rare. The normal childhood diseases were few and far between and their impact was softened by our technology. With that comes complacency. The anti-vax lobby 150 years ago was laughed at because their scare mongering may have stopped people vaccinating, but those who vaccinated lived. People quickly changed their tune when their vaccinated neighbours lived and their kids died to smallpox. Reality had a harsh way of teaching people a lesson.

Those who do not learn from history are doomed to make the same mistakes. I predicted that an anti-vax backlash would occur when the anti-vax  got so successful that they destroyed the herd immunity of a western nation to the point that common diseases could return.

If you won’t learn by the carrot then unfortunately it is the stick. The price of Andrew Wakefield and the likes of Sherri Tenpenny, Mercola, Adams was increased disease. We are seeing record increases in common diseases that we were on the verge of eliminating.

The great fear is that the low vaccination rates in the west may translate to a disease that is genuinely a lot more deadly than Measles.

But the anti-vax won’t go down quietly. The benefit of not actually understanding immunology is that you can stick to nonsensically faulty arguments because they aren’t based on any real understanding of the situation.

I came across a post last week entitled “Dear Parents, you are being lied to. “ In it the author attempted to essentially tell parents who choose not to vaccinate that they are wrong, victims of a deceitful web of lies, and the equivalent of “vaccine preventable disease receptacles.” I was so hoping this article would not be popular because to be honest, I didn’t want to address the flaws in her argument (where does one start?) and I certainly didn’t want to increase her blog traffic.

But reading that article was like dangling a carrot in front of a ravenous rabbit or a carcass in front of a starving wolf. Okay, maybe it’s more like throwing a red flag at an attorney (can someone say charge!).  Either way, this article got shared, and posted on my wall, and posted on other walls, and people began to wonder “Are they being lied to?” Well, yes…you are…if you actually believe what you read in that article.

Here is how the article should have read:

This from the people who claim that a disease that once killed roughly 8 million people and was the doom of civilisations is harmless.

It is my advice that anyone who wishes to speak about vaccination should be able to explain basic human immunology then explain how immunoglobulin works and how cross matching blood works. Because they simply do not. The dialogue with regards to immunology is non-existent. The anti-vax lobby works purely on hearsay and (for want of a better word) gossip. Anecdotes power the anti-vax movement.

It would be like me putting up photos of INXS front man Michael Hutchence and tell people to never wear belts. It would be like me showing a picture of a tragic accident I attended where a man died thanks to the seatbelt he was wearing and use it to lobby against seatbelts ignoring the thousands of people (including myself and my girlfriend) who have walked away from a car accident that may have wounded or killed us in the past.

So let’s take apart her article.

Dear Parents, 

You are being lied to. There are pharmaceutical companies who claim to be acting in the best interests of your children, but they’re putting your health and even lives at risk for the sake of profits. There are some doctors, who, despite not being trained on the history of, lack of science behind, adverse reactions, or additives in vaccinations, refuse to read the package inserts and contrary scientific evidence, and do not inform you of the true risks of a vaccine so you can make an educated decision. You’re being lied to…because you’re told you’re just a parent, and you don’t have a say.

There is more profit in treating Measles than preventing it. Each MMR vaccine costs $5.6 and in total costs twice that for your two doses.

Calpol for a 100mL bottle costs around £2 so let us say it’s $2 a bottle of 100 mL and you normally give 10 mL to a child who has Measles around 2 to 4 times a day (let’s take the average of 3) so in  two weeks of Measles you would go through roughly (let’s say 12 days worth) a bottle every 3 days and so use around four bottles. This is $8 in total versus $12, a saving of $4.

Now throw in the fact you have to take time off your work and may not get paid leave. You be saving $4 but you certainly aren’t earning 2 weeks of wages. Not to mention the economic blow if you are using paid leave to effectively babysit a preventable disease. This is without any complication which would require a single hospital visit which if you are American means a payout to your friendly neighbourhood medical system that is more than $12.

Factor in school hours lost and damage to a child’s education and that amount of money lost to the economy is rather large and the people it hurts the most are the kids and the parents. Now some parents stay at home. These parents are not affected by the loss of income since they already are at home and not earning anything. And unless you come from a family that understands education, the loss of two school weeks is often blown off. When I was sick when younger my parents would insist I get the day’s work from my friends and “read” in bed at least for an hour.

I know my friends played Mortal Kombat instead. My parents lived or died on education. It was their football, their basketball or their rap music. It was a way out of poverty and it meant everything to them. But if you didn’t have that upbringing imagine the time lost? But we shall go into more detail because we have to take into account the next statement.

They say that measles is a deadly disease. But it’s not…unless you look at a fact sheet from the World Health Organization (cited in the opposing article) which looks at measles rates globally. You know what else is deadly in third-world countries? A sneeze. Do you know how measles presents most of the time? A rash.

I work in the “third world”

This is where I work. Narrow, Dirty Alleyways to see patients who cannot afford Calpol ($2 a bottle = Rs. 140).

The problem here is the dismissal of the “third world”. Now there are issues with the third world that make Measles deadly. Lack of access to medicine being the major one of them. Now here is the thing. I have seen around 8 to 10 cases of Measles in India. They are rare where I like and work. Because I ask a question

“Thaddup Oosi Pottingla?” – Have you vaccinated your child? The proud parent says “yes”. If I wished to see a case of Measles? I would probably be better off going to the UK and hanging around Hera. Her hospital’s seeing an outbreak. Now remember that the chronic starvation in India makes Measles deadlier too.

So what’s the western complication rate for Measles? 30%. Same as India, what changes is the fact that access to modern evidence based medicine saves lives. In western nations the mortality is around 1 per 5000, in developing nations it can be as high as 10 per 100.

You have a large list of complications. Common ones include

• diarrhoea
• vomiting
• middle ear infection (otitis media), which can cause earache
• eye infection (conjunctivitis)
• inflammation of the voice box (laryngitis)
• pneumonia, bronchitis and croup (infections of the airways and lungs)
• fits caused by a fever (febrile seizures)

Pneumonia requiring hospitalisation is a common condition and otitis media untreated can lead to hearing loss. And believe me, the anti-vax are unlikely to come see a doctor about otitis media.

So is that it? Not quite. Then you have less common complications.

• liver infection (hepatitis)
• misalignment of the eyes (squint), if the virus affects the nerves and muscles of the eye
• infection of the membranes surrounding the brain and spinal cord (meningitis) and infection of the brain itself (encephalitis)

Okay while a squint isn’t lethal, it is disfiguring. Now here is the question to the older generations. Remember growing up? Remember how many children had hearing loss and squints growing up? Wonder how many of them got it thanks to a universal disease that is easily prevented. And this is without the two medical emergencies of hepatitis and encephalitis.

But maybe there are rarer issues than this

• serious eye disorders, such as an infection of the optic nerve (the nerve that transmits information from the eye to the brain), known as optic neuritis, which can lead to blindness
• heart and nervous system problems
• a fatal brain complication known as subacute sclerosing panencephalitis (SSPE), which can sometimes occur several years after measles – however, this is very rare, occurring in only one in every 25,000 cases of measles

Rare issues but it’s not so rare when it is you or your loved gets whacked by one of these. Then Measles “stops” being Measles and you  begin to listen to the third world medic who kept telling you that Measles is deadly.

Measles killed civilisations.

Let’s take Cuba. The natives were ravaged by smallpox. Measles? It killed 2 out of 3 natives. At one point it killed 50% of the population of Honduras. It played a role in destroying the Incans and the decimation of the Native Americans. In the past 150 years, Measles has resulted in more than 200 million  fatalities. And this is without the morbidity of Measles.

If you are not immune to measles and you become infected while you are pregnant, there is a risk of:

• a miscarriage
• stillbirth
• premature birth
• low birth-weight

30%, still want to take that risk?

They say that chickenpox is a big deal. But it’s not.

Before the licensure of the vaccine, only 4 million cases of chicken pox occurred annually and the varicella mortality rate was only 0.4 deaths per 1 million people. In the 25 years prior to vaccine licensure, only 2,262 people died (about 90 people per year). Let’s put that into perspective…more than 1,000 people die every year falling down their stairs and 200 people die each year from accidentally drowning. I think the real epidemic here centers around your staircase.

Only “4 million”. And again,  mortality is low. Anti-Vax think morbidity doesn’t exist. And these are people giving you medical advice.

And stairs are required to travel up and downstairs. You literally are suggesting children live in sickness. The puzzling notion that falling sick is “good”. Yes it’s harmless but the argument is that it’s unnecessary because it’s not deadly. Never mind the actual suffering.

I mean “Diarrhoea” is not deadly in the west but you remember the sensation.

They say the flu is dangerous. But it’s not.
The data on influenza statistics is a mess. Currently influenza/pneumonia is the 9th leading cause of death. According to the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics, “influenza and pneumonia” took 62,034 lives in 2001. Most people would hear that number and run out and get a flu shot. Funny how they lump two “illnesses” in together like that. What they should have said was “61,777 people died from pneumonia and 257 from the flu and in only 18 cases was the flu virus positively identified.”

CDC uses two categories of underlying cause of death information listed on death certificates: pneumonia and influenza (P&I) causes and respiratory and circulatory (R&C) causes. CDC uses statistical models with records from these two categories to make estimates of influenza-associated mortality. CDC uses underlying R&C deaths (which include P&I deaths) as the primary outcome in its mortality modeling because R&C deaths provide an estimate of deaths that include secondary respiratory or cardiac complications that follow influenza. R&C causes of death are more sensitive than underlying P&I deaths and more specific than deaths from all causes.

Pneumonia is not an inflammatory condition  of the lung. There are a variety of causes including influenza and measles viruses. Now the majority of pneumonia cases are due to strep pneumonia (50%) a bacteria. Viral pneumonia is around 15%. Fungal and Parasitic pneumonias exist as do non-infective pneumonias. In this case these are pneumonias associated with influenza.

The fact that the author doesn’t know that Pneumonia is not caused by a single pathogen is telling nor does she know how the actual Influenza mortality classification works.

CDC does not know exactly how many people die from seasonal flu each year. This is true. But that’s not the whole story. There are reasons for this.

First, states are not required to report individual seasonal flu cases or deaths of people older than 18 years of age to CDC. The CDC has to actively chase these up and look through patient histories.

Second, seasonal influenza is infrequently listed on death certificates of people who die from flu-related complications since the cause of death is the complication.

Third, many seasonal flu-related deaths occur one or two weeks after a person’s initial infection, either because the person may develop a secondary bacterial co-infection (such as bacterial pneumonia) or because seasonal influenza can aggravate an existing chronic illness (such as congestive heart failure or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease).

Fourth, most people who die from seasonal flu-related complications are not tested for flu, or they seek medical care later in their illness when seasonal influenza can no longer be detected from respiratory samples.

Fifth, Sensitive influenza tests are only likely to detect influenza if performed within a week after onset of illness. In addition, some commonly used tests to diagnose influenza in clinical settings are not highly sensitive and can provide false negative results (i.e. they misdiagnose flu illness as not being flu.)

Flu deaths in children are a nationally notifiable, and since then, states have reported flu-related child deaths in the United States through the Influenza Associated Pediatric Mortality Surveillance System.

So not exactly true, co-morbidity is important.

See that candidiasis in the form of thrush is a temporary if embarassing problem. With the co-morbidity it stops being embarrassing and starts being deadly.

Since the flu shot is ineffective and often exposes one to the flu. I’ll opt out and take my chances.

It’s 65% effective. Even if it were 50% effective it would be a 50% drop in flue rates. It’s not effective on the basis it doesn’t stop 100% of things. Which is why the anti-vax are anti-bullet proof vests and anti-seatbelts because they too are not 100% effective. And it doesn’t expose you to the flu. You get a day of mild fever after it. That is not the flu.

They say the vaccine prevents whooping cough. But it doesn’t.According to the pertussis prevalence data, incidence of pertussis was decreasing before the licensure of the vaccine in 1949. After licensure pertussis incidences increased, stabilized, and then reached a 50-year high in 2013. (Do check out the lovely chart on p. 64 here).And now, the CDC admits they’ve discovered vaccine-resistantpertussis and that children who receive the vaccine can becomeasymptomatic carriers and spread the bacteria. What? So the vaccine is to blame for the outbreaks occurring in an almost exclusively vaccinated population? I’m shocked (okay, not really).

The vaccine was made in 1930 btw. Not 1949. It began to be commonly used in 1940s.

Note how the falls occur AFTER vaccination began.

Note how Pertussis fell after the introduction of the vaccine with regular spikes due to the natural incidence spikes as seen on all predator-prey relationships.

And note how the rate plummeted till it was almost a non-issue.

And note how recently the rate has been rising. And that’s because the incidence of vaccination for pertussis has been falling thanks to anti-vax. The vaccine is effective, the problem is people aren’t taking the vaccine.The population is not exclusively vaccinated. Roughly  80% (82.5%) of the US children’s population is vaccinated against Pertussis.

That’s nearly 1 in 5 kids who are not protected. By contrast? Where I work? I have a near 98% vaccination rate. Pertussis is falling.

Here are your real options: increase your child’s chance of getting (and spreading) whooping cough by getting a harmful, ineffective vaccine associated with brain damage (DTP), one that may cause autism and enhances the growth of parapertussis bacteria, which can cause a typically milder strain of whooping cough (DTaP) or makes one an asymptomatic carrier (Tdap). No thanks. I don’t want my child to get pertussis (or give it to anyone else) so I’m running as far away as I can from that vaccine.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZV4IAHbC48

Here are your real options if you live in the real world rather than the fantasy world where a lack of knowledge about the immune system is a requirement for discussing immunological issues.

You either vaccinate against this painful disease and help protect infants against this deadly disease through the herd immunity.

Or you spread the disease around. And bear in mind the two other diseases on this vaccine are the deadly Tetanus and the “Strangling Angel” Diptheria.

I do like the fact a rodent paper was portrayed as hard evidence. Also? If we analyse the document we get

“Their data showed no within-host competition between B. pertussis and B. parapertussis, as well as a strong acellular vaccine-induced protection against infection with B. pertussis in both singly and co-infected mice. In contrast, vaccination led to a 40-fold enhancement of B. parapertussis colonization in the lungs of mice. Though the mechanism behind this increased colonization was not specifically elucidated,”

So all the “magical elucidation” from this author is faulty.

If we actually talked to someone who knows then you would hear this statement instead.

“Immunity derived from B. Pertussis does not protect against B. Parapertussis because the antigen structure of both are different. This means that antibodies produced against pertussis do not affect parapertussis. This is due to Parapertussis having evolved to colonise lungs that were already affected by pertussis and survive. In addition? It does not produce the toxin so the symptoms of parapertussis are a lot milder.”

Knowing this you would know that the widespread immunity created by vaccination produced an ideal breeding ground for parapertussis. The solution is simple? Add the parapertussis antigen to the Pertussis vaccine.

The fact that the author doesn’t recognise that the symptoms are described as whooping cough but the pathogens are different. The author simply doesn’t understand basic immunology if she thinks her child’s not going to catch an airborne disease spread by coughing.

One cannot be an asymptomatic carrier of Pertussis from the Acellular Pertussis vaccine. It’s a physical impossiblity because acellular pertussis means antigens rather than the actual bacteria. There are no cells. What the author here is describing is “magic”.

They give credit to vaccines for eradicating diseases, but they didn’t. 
Polio (licensed in 1955), hepatitis A (1995) and B (1991),mumps (1967), measles (1963), and pertussis (1949), were all on the decline before the vaccines were introduced. Small pox and pertussis ultimately saw an increase in prevalence after the vaccine andrubella and tetanus was practically nonexistent prior to the vaccine.Mortality in all areas with all diseases were significantly decreased before the vaccine came on the scene. Instead of looking at deceptive CDC graphs that give credit where credit’s not due, try plugging in the year of licensure on both prevalence and mortality charts and discover where the decline occurred for yourself. (For prevalence of polio refer to “Incidence of poliomyelitis in the USA from CDC, 1972 and for measles prevalence use healthsentinel.com).

Polio was on the decline in the USA due to universal adoption of water standards and the rise of plumbing. However there is an event that made polio the scourge of children in the USA. If one were to listen to the anti-vax you would think that Polio is a considerate killer. It is not. It’s just that the spread changed due to changes in the way people lived.

In the USA vast numbers of people had outhouses, with the rise of proper hygenic sewage disposal these became rare. This meant that drinking water contamination dropped. But with rising affluence in the USA there was one period of time where large numbers of people immersed their buttocks into a shared water pool and splished and splashed for hours.

It’s called summer and the location is called swimming pools. And remember all those photos I put up? India still hasn’t really sorted out universal sewage and hygenic toilets or clean drinking water.

India has no cases of Polio and is officially Polio free but will still have to keep vaccinating because Afghanistan and Pakistan still have Polio cases. We are stamping out polio with vaccinations as we speak. It is an achievement. It is an achievement I was part of and am still part of. Unlike this lady who would deem our efforts to be futile.

These stats are fantastic. Polio is nearly eliminated with less than 500 cases a year worldwide. Rabies mortality is negligible and is still falling. We can demonstrate the colossal power of vaccination due to the fact we have effectively eliminated rabies from our dogs and western rabies is a rarity. In fact in the UK all of our rabies cases have been in visitors to India. You are more likely to catch Rabies travelling than you are at home because of the rabies vaccine and had these individuals sought help in India they would have lived.

Again we see the anti-vax problem of understanding different things to do with medicine. Mortality/Morbidity rates = No. of people dying/injured per people affected. Vaccines mainly work by reducing incidence of disease or the number of cases. The mortality rate remains the same but since fewer people are affected the fatalities drop. So what anti-vax are doing is taking advantage of the effectiveness of medicine in treating infective diseases and claiming that is the only cause in the drop of fatality rates. Never mind the fact that vaccines only really drop incidence.

So let’s say there are 5000 people who fall sick and of that 15 die. Vaccines would drop that to 1000 people who fall sick and 5 dying (AKA they drop the denominatory). The medicines we give would drop the rate to 1000 people who fall sick and 1 dying (AKA it drops the numerator). This is important to understand in order to realise how ridiculous the anti-vaccine lobby is. That advancements in medicine dropping the number off deaths is all we need and that dropping the number of people getting the disease is not important.

In this list Measles, Mumps and Pertussis were not on the decline but formed peaks and troughs as numbers of people available to infect changed. It’s called a predator prey relationship. Assume we are prey and rather than dying we get immunity and cannot be infected again. We are effectively out of the food pool. So as the disease progresses more and more people are infected making it harder to spread because there are fewer prey available. So the disease reduces in spread. As this happens the number of people being born exceeds the rate of infection causing more fresh targets to be available and so causing the disease to spread again and vice versa around this equilibrium position. Measles just followed the downtrend, without vaccination it would just follow a third world non-vaccinated population incidence of the similar cyclical increase and decrease. What the anti-vax want you to think is that the downtrend was going to reduce to this level.

Because Measles, Mumps and Pertussis are polite and after killing us for fun for thousands of years was just going to go away and leave us alone. Bear in mind these are are three airborne diseases. And you really cannot disinfect your air all that easily.

Rubella was not prevalent because it’s such a mild disease. No one notices it. Not until they are pregnant. Because the effect of Rubella is seen in the child. People wouldn’t have noticed it, however they would have noticed that post vaccination a lot of birth defects stopped occurring. And Tetanus was rare. In what planet and in what existence? From 1922-1926, there were an estimated 1,314 cases of tetanus per year in the U.S. In the late 1940′s, the tetanus vaccine was introduced, and tetanus became a disease that was officially counted and tracked by public health officials. In 2000, only 41 cases of tetanus were reported in the U.S. It is a horrific disease. It’s painful paralytic death. To avoid it is common sense. The only reason you have gotten away with your bullshit so far is that we vaccinate enough so as cases are still rare. One day, someone will listen to this woman’s advice.

And then there will be hell to pay. Because that’s the only way the anti-vax learn. Only until they screw up.

What eradicated and decreased the prevalence of these diseases? Considering “germs only live in environments conducive to their growth,” the stark declines in disease can be attributed tobetter living conditions, quarantine programs, hygiene, clean water, indoor plumbing, and better access to acute care. But if you want, we can pretend that maggots, parasites, microbes, and other germs don’t respond to changes in their environment. They’d much prefer a clean house to a rotting trash can.

Which is nice, except diseases like Measles are airborne and don’t live in rotting cans. In fact? Most viruses require a living host to be spread and most of the viruses on these lists are spread by humans.

Which is why I find it weird. Africa and India and China have not magically become paragons of hygiene yet have seen rather large falls in these diseases.

And the biggest joke here is the idiotic idea that cure is better than prevention. Vaccinations are disease prevention, acute care is curing an acquired disease. And to put that into perspective? We must go back to the mathematics.

$12 for vaccination, $8 for basic calpol. 30% Measles complication rate each of which is worth at the very least more than 3 times the cost of the vaccine. In fact? Each child with pneumonia or otitis media will require a hospital stay where you could vaccinate dozens of kids for the cost each day. If they have encephalitis or severe pneumonia they will require ICU care. Then you could vaccinate around a hundred children.

Per Day.

And for that unlucky person whose kid has Encephalitis? Is the permanent brain damage you have foisted upon that child through your consistent ignorance worth it? And for that unlucky person whose kid died of Measles? Do you say “your sons death is the price I am willing to pay for my  unscientific beliefs“? Or do you make up more excuses and find more idiotic ways to blame doctors when you are propping up a pseudoscientific quack belief without even a high school understanding of the topic.

Remind me again, acute care is way more expensive than vaccination and you want us to use that instead to prevent deaths?

That’s like saying we should stop vaccinating for Polio and instead invest in more Iron lungs.

They say vaccination is better than “natural infection.” But they’re wrong.

You barely understand the immune system yet make this frankly fantastic claim.

Yeah, it completely makes sense that we are all born with immune systems that have absolutely no clue how to function. Instead of exposing ourselves to viruses in nature which build our immune systems (like every other mammal) and give us lifetime immunity, we’ll expose ourselves to the mutated, live, and attenuated viruses and harmful additives in a vaccine, that may or may not work, and if it does only affords temporary immunity. Makes complete sense.

India’s infant mortality rate is plummeting. It used to be around 120 per 1000. It fell to around 70. It is now around 40 per 1000. This is massive progress. Colossal improvements due to so many reasons and one of the main reasons are the universal vaccination schemes for mother and children which prevent childhood deaths.

Pneumonia, Meningitis, Measles, Diarrhoea. All have vaccines provided for in India that helped drop this rate.

The problem with this is that many “harmless” diseases are not so harmless. They only appear harmless because people like this charming lady don’t deal with really serious cases of disease. To them Haemophillus Influenza vaccines are given to stop influenza. Not to stop meningitis. This is forgetting that our immune system while fantastic is fighting against pathogens that are equally fantastic.

And it’s laughable. Wild animals live less healthier lives in the wild. A wild tiger may live a couple of decades. One with access to medicine may even double it’s life expectancy. There are countries without any medical coverage and universally the people there perish young. Like Afghanistan or large parts of Africa.

So how do they do this? Create strawmen of vaccines that use mutated, killed and attenuated vaccines and harmful additives using a dialogue that doesn’t understand Chemistry. If I were to use the anti-vax dialogue i would tell you to not eat proteins since they contain cyanide and to not eat table salt since sodium is explosive and chlorine is incredibly poisonous.

This is the sort of person who doesn’t care about all the people who died during the era of natural immunity. And anyone who says this clearly has no idea about medicine.

They say that vaccines have been rigorously tested for safety and are subjected to a higher level of scrutiny than any other medicine. But they’re wrong.

Medical drug approval is rigorous and requires pre-clinical testing in animals, an application and review, three phases of testing, and another review before it is approved. Studies are usually done with inactive placebos (like a sugar pill or saline solution) to determine side-effects, and then later compared to other treatments for the same disease, but not without passing the prior phase first. The dying cancer patient who did not get into the clinical trial will not get their hands on that experimental drug until it’s licensed and approved. Period.

Vaccine approval is a cake-walk in comparison. Usually two small studies (where test subjects are followed for a mere 5-15 days) are all that a pharmaceutical company needs to have before approval is granted (except in the case of the meningitis vaccine, which is being distributed without a license and is not approved for use in the United States). Most studies are not even done in this country – they are done in other countries and disposable children in Africa. Oh, the CDC conveniently leaves out the  part about clinical trials being done with prior vaccines, adjuvants, or complex vaccines.

Yes, they are tried out in places like Africa or India.

Because these places still have the diseases people are trying to prevent. I mean testing out a Cholera vaccine is pointless in Luton. But rather more useful when doing so in Haiti where there was a large Cholera outbreak. Again? What’s the point of testing the Malaria vaccine in Canada? The HIV vaccine may have some use for testing in the UK but in Africa it would have a rapid and large sample that would show better results.

Vaccine approvals are not cake walks.

Oh and the Meningitis vaccine is not approved of in the USA and despite what this lady thinks? There are other vaccine testing bodies such as the WHO and indeed the NHS. The CDC is just well known among vaccine circles because “America”.

The fact is the children in India are a lot more disposable thanks to you and your useful idiots such as Jagganath Chaterjee. How fucking privileged are you to deny my patients the same systems of medicine that saved your children’s lives. The lives of my patients are not for you to use to push your pseudoscientific mumbo jumbo.

My patients fear vaccine preventable diseases. Because they still remember what they look like. My mother remembers losing brothers to measles. There is still a practice in India where babies are not named until they live a year because they die so often. That is changing now.

And you want them to remain that way? You wanted them to go back to losing a tenth of their children to diseases you treat as jokes. They are jokes because people like me have made them so. They are jokes because there are doctors who refused to patent the sun. It is why you can laugh at these thieves of time and potential and ignore the victims of these disease to push your ignorant ludditery.

The fact remains that these children never mattered to you. The drug companies may test their drugs and that may be a bad thing but you know what? The drug companies also treat and save these children and give them a future that you take for granted. If that stopped what would you do? Your homeopaths are here too and they don’t do anything. Their drugs don’t work and if they do they have usually been cut with the real deal (As in homeopaths are selling their concoctions cut with real medicine so it has a real effect but at higher costs). None of the quacks have any solutions.

The only people who do and who are willing to do are the people who have evidence to prove that their methods and systems work. Your entire movement is based on the statement “Ignore the evidence”.

And vaccine studies are often done over years because their knock on effects are not seen immediately but down the line. The real benefit of the HPV vaccine is not going to be seen this year or next year but 4 to 5 years down the line as the first users of the vaccine begin their regular pap smears. 10, 20, 30 years down the line we would see the real benefit.

And I speak of the HPV vaccine with particular fondness. This vaccine is in high demand here. Because HPV is so rampant here. It kills a lot of women and robs others of their uteruses. So much so that it’s being considered for licensed production in India and being a part of the universal scheme. This would save millions of women each year in India from cancer.

Indeed, the FDA has never even spelled out in regulations the criteria it uses to decide whether a vaccine is safe and effective for its intended use. - Bruesewitz v. Wyeth LLC 

Hannah Poling’s case? You mean a rare mitochondrial disorder that was undiagnosed may have had some interaction with vaccines. You mean all your children have this incredibly rare disorder?

And the FDA has spelled out clear guidelines of common side effects and acceptable side effects. The funny thing is the majority of side effects for vaccination are fever and pain. Because a pathogenic response comes with fever and pain is part of the response to having a needle stuck into you.

They say doctors readily admit the side effects of vaccinations, that side effects are well-known, and except in very rare cases, are “quite mild.”  Actually, most doctors haven’t read the package inserts, don’t inform the patient of side-effects that go beyond “redness, pain, and swelling at the injection site, dizziness, or fainting” and in all actuality, they don’t have to because the U.S Supreme Court exempted physicians and pharmaceutical companies from vaccine liability in their infamous landmark case that declared vaccines to be “unavoidably unsafe.” 

Actually we do? I read my inserts and actually know most of them of the top of my head. The side effects are very rare though. The difference between us is simple. I emphasise on side effects by rarity. You do them by severity.

Paracetemol can cause liver failure. Aspirin can cause an ulcer and your stomach to rupture. Would you take a drug that causes these issues? No. Then why do we sell these over the counter? Because in order to do these things you would have to exceed dosage and not follow the rules and/or take a them for years and years. These side effects are rare due to the specific conditions that they occur in. What you are doing is telling parents to let their children have a fever because paracetmol causes liver failure omitting the very important parts of the statement.

What you also do is claim that Paracetemol causes autism which is simply not true. When we point that out you add the word “may” to justify your highly unproven statement. Homeopathy may  cause you gonorrhoea, hey there is no proof. But there is no proof otherwise too. Which is why I have qualified it with “may”. It is a false assertion of risk.

So the side-effects of a vaccine are “quite mild” but the rash associated with chicken pox isn’t? Tell that to the recipients of rewards from the Vaccine Compensation Injury Act or the parents of children listed on the VAERS database. Yeah, I know you got paralysis, cancer, guillain barre, and your baby died of SIDS but hey…good thing your baby didn’t get that 3-5 day flu people used to get or that ugly red rash.

Guillain Barre syndrome is associated with the flu vaccine. It is temporary and occurs in roughly  1 in 1,000,000 (actually lower than that). By contrast? The most common antecedents are Campylobacter, CMV and Influenza. Influenza would actually cause more cases of GBS.

Another thing? There is no relationship between SIDS and vaccination. In fact kids who are vaccinated have lower rates of SIDS. This is because many vaccine preventable diseases tax the respiratory system and may contribute to it’s sudden failure. This is an outright lie on her part.

Cancer? Seriously? The HPV vaccine drops cancer rates. In fact it was so effective it was considered unethical to deny the women in the control group the vaccines and this was under 8 years.

And the joke is the biggest causes of paralysis were Polio and Measles and Rubella but thanks to that the incidences of Acute Flaccid Paralysis, Encephalitic Palsy and Cerebral Palsy have dropped. Every single thing listed here has fallen thanks to a vaccine. The statements here are yet more lies.

They say vaccines are safe. But they’re not.

The DTP vaccine caused brain inflammation and death in children. The oral polio vaccine crippled children and adults with vaccine-strain paralytic polio and caused cancer. The pertussis vaccine causes pertussis, the MMR vaccine causes irritable bowel diseases and neurological disorders, the flu shot causes paralysis, and they’re all associated with hundreds of side-effects you can find by reading the package inserts, court cases, and studies.

I will deal with this in particular because it is a particular piece of vaccine “information” that many pro-vaccine sites do not carry.

A comprehensive case-control study run by the NCES in the UK discovered a link between the DTP (not the DTaP which was created in response to this) and encephalitis. Final analysis of a comprehensive case-control study has estimated that the attributable risk of such illnesses is 1 in 140,000 doses administered. In contrast, final analysis of the case-control study found that the risk of serious neurologic illness following pertussis itself was 1/11,000 pertussis cases. Repeated evaluations have shown that the benefits of vaccine outweigh the risks as in the UK prior to vaccination there were an estimated 120,000  cases of pertussis per year in a population of around 50 million. Around 0.25% of the UK would get whooping cough each year. This works out to a lifetime risk for a 60 year old of 15%. Basically? This meant that 3 out of 20 people had pertussis in the UK.

Out of 50 million people? This is 7.5 million people.

Now if we take the encephalitis rate for 50 million with DTP you would get around 358 people.

If we took the neurological illness post pertussis you would get 682 people. And this is not including the number of lives saved from Tetanus.and Diptheria. Bear in mind the British Royal family itself lost members to Diptheria and the disease was feared. It was not pertussis that people feared by the strangling angel.

Remind me again is 680 a bigger number than 360? So in short? If you vaccinated with the DTP you could get a neurological issue and if the entire UK was vaccinated (50 million) there would be just 360 cases. Had the vaccine not been given there would be 680 cases an increase of 300 cases and a near doubling of the rate of neurological defects and this is without taking into account the damage caused by Tetanus and Diptheria or the fact that pertussis kills. Even if we take morbidity the outcomes were superior.

And we do not use the vaccine anymore. The acellular Pertussis vaccine has a much higher safety baprofile so neurological issues do not occur.

The Flu vaccine is estimated to cause 1 in 1,000,000 users GBS. Flu causes 1 in 1000 flu sufferers GBS. Another mathematics fail here.

The MMR vaccine does not cause any of these things and all of these things were attributed to the failed study by Andrew Wakefield. A man who couldn’t even tell the difference between autism and epilepsy, altered patient records to suit his needs, failed to mention competing interests and claimed that the MMR caused autism in a patient who was vaccinated after the autism diagnosis was made (making the MMR vaccine capable of giving you autism through time travel).

Until vaccines are subjected to double-blind placebo controlled studies using an inert saline solution (the standard of evidence-based medicine) and until the benefits outweigh the risks…they’re not safe.

No, a vaccine must be given against another vaccine because a placebo should contain all of the other compounds in the vaccine and another vaccine would provide the necessary antigen that needs to be part of the placebo. Inert Saline is NOT the standard placebo. And the author would understand this had she even the most basic knowledge of immunology.

The rationale is this, when you are injected with a placebo you need to stimulate an immune response however you want to see if it is the antibody  produced that provides the effect not something else so the placebo must produce the immune response but not produce an antibody that targets the pathogen.

They say MMR doesn’t cause autism. But it might.

No. There is no evidence for any link that it causes autism. However the MMR is protective against birth defects. Rubella as a disease has been linked to autism spectrum disorders so in fact the vaccine would probably reduce autism.

Even the vaccine court has rule that evidence of a causal relationship between autism and MMR exists and that MMR can cause brain encephalopathy leading to permanent brain injury or death. Study after study after study, vaccine inserts, and countless court cases have confirmed this link. I don’t know about you, but I am not a fan of the “inject now worry about it later” mentality and I certainly didn’t choose my stance because I saw an unsubstantiated, inflammatory media attack on Dr. Wakefield. It’s time to stop bashing Wakefield and start addressing autism. 

The Vaccine court pays out. It’s not worth doctors contesting court cases. It is simpler to just settle. It doesn’t mean the doctor is guilty, it just means that competing the court case even if you are correct is more hassle and expense than settling.

And the vaccine court is ruled that for Hanna “I have a mitochondrial disorder that is really really rare” Poling.

As for your links?

Thimerosal is no longer used in vaccines much to the glee of vaccine manufacturers because they make more money since vaccines can no longer be stored.

The Daily Mail is not a scientific paper. The Daily Mail is infamous for scaremongering and was one of the original papers that ran Andrew Wakefield’s bullshit as reality. Their role in the damage caused to thousands of children is a testament to the value of good science reporting rather than bullshit fear mongering.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4abk9fd_lR4

Oh the last study is good. It’s 22 papers all claiming that they support the notion that vaccines causes autism. And I am not going to debunk them because The Angry Autie already has. Surprise surprise, they are all weak papers drummed up to take advantage of quackery and often posted in non-specialist journals. In many cases the journals were heavily quote mined under the assumeption that no one’s going to check all the sources.

They say thimerosal in vaccines doesn’t cause autism, but it might.

Thimerosal has not been used for nearly two decades. FYI? It is good to keep up to date with science.

There are over 15,000 articles in the medical literature describing the adverse health effects of mercury exposure on the human body, so it seems logical that one might be concerned. Although thimerosal has been reduced or removed from most vaccines, it is still present in the yearly influenza vaccine (unless you request one without) and was present in three vaccines (DTaP, Hep b, and Hib) all of which either listed autism, brain encephalitis, or neurological damage as possible adverse reactions. Considering the most recent autism statistics are from 2010 and aluminum was the replacement of choice for thimerosal – the verdict is still out. Is replacing something harmful with something harmful any better? We should probably make sure there’s no chance of autism before we go injecting any neurotoxin into our children. 

I bet there are tonnes describing the adverse effects of raw sodium.

They say a child gets more exposure to aluminum in breast milk and that aluminum is safe. Wrong again. 

A single vaccine contains 0.5 mg

Breast milk contains 0.04 per litre. Tell me. How many litres of breast milk does a child go through in a week? In a month? In 6 months? All those bottles add up. Also?

We rarely see the anti-vax take on the dread aluminium in pepto-bismol.

The biggest sources of aluminum exposure our children face comes from formula and vaccines. A minute amount of aluminum (0.04 mg/L) may be present in breast milk (which differs from mother to mother and goes through the digestive tract and easily exits viafeces), but 0.1 – 0.5 mg/L is present in each dose of a vaccine and gets carried through the blood stream to be eliminated by the kidneys. That’s alarming considering a baby doesn’t obtain full kidney function until they are 1-2 years old and can’t properly excrete aluminum. So a child gets 49 doses of various vaccines injected into the bloodstream before age 6 and that’s not concerning? Can you say, heavy metal toxicity?

That’s not a link to anything.

Here is the thing. In the first 6 months of life the baby receives 4 mg of aluminium from vaccines. 10 from breast milk, 40 from formula and around 120 mg from soy based formula (some babies are allergic to milk).

Roughly 1% of aluminium is maintained. And this is the first time I have heard about a baby not being born with full kidney function. Pray tell what exactly does the kidney not function? Because any failure to function either causes dehydration or causes protein loss leading to anasarca. Neither of which are normal states for an infant.

The two groups of people most harmed by aluminium are people with severe kidney failure taking antacids and very early neo-nates.

Now I know what the anti-vax have done. They are utilising the very early neo-nate as the model for aluminium excretion in term babies. By very early I mean a baby born at 24 weeks rather than 37 to 42 weeks. Big difference there in development and function of kidneys.

Each antacid dose contains many thousands of times the dose of your vaccines combined. Every time you take a swig you consume between 1000 to 2000 mg of aluminium. Even a 10% absorption rate is 10 to 20 mg.

This is where it is dangerous. Some mothers HAVE to feed formula. Some mothers don’t make enough milk. Some mothers cannot make milk (breast cancer survivors) and some children cannot drink milk. So they have to drink formula. When idiots like this portray formula as bad and full of aluminium you have babies that fail to thrive as mothers refuse to give the only thing that we do have that can keep babies alive.

Oh and the 49 doses of various vaccines meme! Nice. There are only 10 vaccines on the list. Oh you mean doses! I checked, there are 34 doses of vaccines on the schedule. Not 49. And aluminium in total from all these vaccines? Let us assume they all have 0.5 mg in them. 17 mg in 6 years. Or 0.17 mg in 6 years since 99% of it is excreted. This is an amount of aluminium so small when diluted in blood that it isn’t detected. It’s like literally complaining about the 0.17 mg of aluminium when the remaining 110 mg of aluminium we all contain comes from our food. Oh and in order to start having neurological syndromes? You need to hit around a hundred times this. so 11000 mg of aluminium. So 0.17/110 is around 0.1% and against a case of aluminium toxicity? It’s around 0.001%.

Regardless, there is no logical justification for exposing a baby to more of something that is harmful. Aluminum is  classified as a hazardous substance that triggers an immune system pathway response associated with all sorts of chronic medical conditions like allergies, eczema, lupus, inflammatory bowel disease, autism, hyperactivity disorders, dysfunctional immune system,neurotoxicity, diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis,brain encephalopathy, bone disease, and interferes with a variety of metabolic and cellular processes in the nervous system. Here’s a good read on the toxicological profile of aluminum.

That’s the damn point. The entire point of the aluminium is to trigger the immune system pathway response to the antigen. The immune system pathway response is associated with all these conditions because they are auto-immune disorders. It is also involved in beating diseases.

Again the anti-vax show a frightful ignorance of basic human biology and yet deem themselves fit to advise others.

They say that claims made to the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) and National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (NVICP) don’t prove vaccines are harmful. But they do.

VAERS is a database that one can go to report an adverse reaction to a vaccine. It is estimated that only 1% of the population actually reports these side-effects.

Actually the problem with VAERS is any event after a vaccination is put on there and analysed. And it is not estimated that 1% of the population actually reports these side effects.

Because I work in India. I am the ONLY doctor out here. I am the first and only port of call for these patients. I walk past my patients daily and I simply do not see this claim being true. This is a baseless claim. In fact the reality seems to be that VAERS has a high report rate because anyone can put any event on there even ones not related to vaccination. The point of it is a tool to collate data. If a lot of people are saying “x happens” after “y vaccine”, people can look into it.

Just because something is on VAERS doesn’t mean it’s true. The best example is the DTaP was associated with SIDS among anti-vax. Turns out? Kids who have the DTaP have fewer instances of SIDS. This is a lie just being told to make people believe that there are more vaccine related injuries than listed.

Guess what? The side effect rate for the flu vaccine is around 30% with mainly fevers being reported. According to these clowns there are more vaccine side effects out there than actual people who have been vaccinated. So if 100 people are vaccinated with the flu vaccine, 30 will get a fever. But according to Anti-Vax nearly 3000 people have a fever which is strange since there are only 100 in this. I am afraid this is just more mathematics being wheeled out of nowhere that simply makes no sense.

And it’s true, no “cause and effect” relationship has ever been established between the millions of reported side-effects and deaths associated with vaccinations. How convenient, no “cause and effect” relationship was established in the clinical trials either, or on any other pharmaceutical or government-funded study. Doing otherwise would de-regulate the entire billion dollar vaccine industry. Besides, its much easier to blame your child’s brain encephalitis or post-vaccine seizure on the weather anyway. 

Er… antigen presentation from damaged pathogens causes the immune system to produce antibodies that are effective against the undamaged pathogen. Cause and Effect. Again, basic immunology.

And these side effects are often due to quacks simply making random claims. Like the autism claim. Vaccination does not cause autism, there is absolutely no links between the two. Yet anti-vax insist it does while producing no real research, faulty papers, quote mining and a complete and total lack of understanding of the physiology and pathology of immunity.

And I am afraid the NHS’s ran the earlier mentioned NCES study which kind of scuppers your plans. In fact most governments run safety and efficacy studies on vaccines and chart their failings. And pharmaceutical companies have it in their interest to make sure they are safe because most vaccines have government purchasers and governments are very very good at prosecuting flawed products.

Also? Febrile seizures are harmless and caused by any fever. Guess what? Not vaccinating gives your children more diseases that they can get fevers to seize from.

As for the NVICP, this program was founded because there was so much tort litigation as a result of vaccine injuries that an attempt was made to stabilize the vaccine market. There’s a tax on each vaccine that goes into a fund to pay these claims which a petitioner will not get compensated for unless their condition has no other proven cause but the vaccine. “As of December 1, 2011, the program had awarded $2.35 billion in 2,810 separate claims, including compensation for 390 deaths.” And so many people have reported the development of autism post-vaccine that the  Autism Omnibus Proceeding was established to handle these cases.

Actually it was because anti-vax found it easy to litigate since in the USA you don’t need to prove anything to sue a doctor. A doctor is tried as an expert by his peers so you don’t really need anything to sue. The mere inkling of misdemeanour is enough. So the NVICP was created to deal with heavily litigious anti-vax and simply pay out so that doctors were not harmed. Because vaccination programs were saving hundreds of thousands of children and billions of dollars each year.

The program awards money if certain medical events that are presumed to be side effects of vaccination as long as no other cause is found.

Oh and in this 390 deaths do you know what the major cause of death was?

Allergy. They got anaphylaxis. The tragedy is some children cannot be vaccinated as they are allergic to proteins in the vaccine. For the same reason some children can never experience a peanut butter sandwich. Out of an entire nation of 300 million people and the various people who have died since the NVICP began. Now the problem is this person doesn’t realise this but.

The NVICP is a special court set up by Congress for people who claim they were injured by vaccines.

Instead of trying to sue the vaccine makers, which is an incredibly expensive, difficult, and time-consuming process since “big pharma can really lawyer up”, those plaintiffs get fast-tracked through a non-adversarial system. That means that instead of making them fight in a court, the government pays for their (As in the Vaccine injured’s) counsel and works with them to determine whether compensation is appropriate. Plaintiffs in the NVICP win their cases much more often than plaintiffs in the normal product-liability courts, and even if they lose they don’t have to pay for their own lawyers. A big saving.

Now the issue is the Autism Anti-Vax are trying to kill the program because in light of all evidence, the NVICP has rejected the claim that vaccines cause autism. They hope that they can push this through a normal court and get a sympathetic judge and jury.

This would harm people with actual side effects from vaccines.  These are rare. Since 1988 there have been just 2810 claims. Roughly a hundred claims a year among the millions of doses of vaccines given out in the USA. These people are better off in NVICP where they face slow, expensive trials where the vaccine manufacturers can simply stall till you go bankrupt. Instead you are given medical related counsel who are more likely to pick up on an adverse effect.

Even the U.S Supreme Court recognizes vaccines have risks (including death). Let’s get on board guys and stop ignoring the millions of vaccine-injured children who live among us.

So do seatbelts, but the benefits they have outweight the risks. And the only way that there are millions of vaccine injured children exist is due to the unskilled medical assumptions by Megan who literally has no real qualifications apart from “is a mother”.

They say unvaccinated children put vaccinated children at risk. But they don’t.

The current outbreaks in the USA and UK are due to unvaccinated children. A basic understanding of herd immunity would let you know this but considering Megan lacks even the most basic high school level understanding of the topic?

Yes, that’s completely logical. How about I take birth control so you don’t get pregnant. Maybe I should run an extra mile too so you can lose weight. Put your burger down…it’s going to go straight to my butt. Seriously, if you’re vaccinated and you believe you’re protected then you have nothing to worry about right?

Because vaccination is not 100% effective, we all rely on the herd immunity to reduce our exposure to pathogens. If we are subject to sufficient contact then we will get the disease. In addition? There are children who have

1. Not been vaccinated yet

2. Cannot be vaccinated

3. Are immuno-compromised

And these children are affected the most. It’s not vaccinated kids who worry. It is the very young and the very old who are. Those 6 month old babies are not protected. That child who is allergic to egg cannot be vaccinated. That kid with Leukemia? Or those old people who have lived such long lives that their immune systems are no longer perfect.

All of these people do exist and are protected by the herd immunity. And they can all go to hell in Megan’s world. Because all kids are healthy except those who were injured by vaccines.

They say unvaccinated children are causing outbreaks of “vaccine preventable diseases.” But that’s impossible to prove and the opposite could be true. Someone please tell me how one can scientifically prove a disease outbreak is caused by an unvaccinated child, when the “outbreaks” are occurring almost exclusively in the vaccinated population? In some cases, vaccination rates have been at 100%. It’s like trying to figure out which of your 600 cows pooped in the pasture and coming to the ultimate conclusion that the cow poop came from your  chicken.

It’s easy to prove. We just compare rates of disease in both. In fact we have. Generally unvaccinated or partially vaccinated children bear the brunt of epidemics. In fact when we compare the incidence of both diseases (that’s important, raw numbers don’t tell us anything) we find that vaccine preventable diseases are rare among the vaccinated and common among the unvaccinated.

So quite simply. TLDR? Unvaccinated children had higher incidences of vaccine preventable diseases and there was no added difference in autoimmune, allergies and chronic disorders. In short? Megan’s wrong.

This was government study and had a 13,600 strong cohort. By comparison? Andrew Wakefields cohorot was less than 15.

And no vaccination rate is at 100%. See it’s claims like this that raise alarm bells. They are so unrealistic to anyone actually involved in medicine or science.

And we can trace how diseases spread, it isn’t rocket science. It is just basic medical detective work. It’s how we linked a measles outbreak to a woman at a Foo Fighters concert or how we deal with Ebola in Africa. We know how diseases spread, how they behave and can make educated guesses as to how and where it came from and then confirm them. This is outside Megan’s ken because she simply doesn’t understand the topic.

You got the flu? So go back through your day  and then realise you were probably in contact with someone with the disease. Someone who was snuffling away. Maybe it was that red nosed man in the lift sneezing his head off? Now remember every person who sees you remembers you as the person who gave them the flu. We can track this. We can see what commonalities people have and then canvas and ask around and find out. This is not rocket science.

The earliest form of such was Doctor John Snow (Who did know something) and postulated that Cholera was spread by water. So he looked at a map of London, figured out where Cholera was at the most endemic and disabled their pumps forcing them to get water from other places. John Snow’s basic understanding of disease allowed him to help fight a Cholera epidemic.

Now…we know from reading the studies and vaccine package inserts that vaccines can cause the very diseases they’re designed to prevent. We know from studies conducted on MMR that some children experience vaccine-strain measles post-vaccination. We know that chicken pox vaccine can cause chicken pox, Tdap can cause outbreaks of pertussis, and the oral polio vaccine caused vaccine-associated paralytic polio. We know that meningitis is a side effect on several package inserts and that the old HiB meningitis vaccine was removed from the market because it caused meningitis. We know that mumps outbreaks have occurred in the fully vaccinated population. And finally, we know that live-virus vaccines like yellow fever, MMR, and varicella shed and that people who get inactivated viral vaccines can become asymptomatic carriers. 

You are just reading studies without understanding anything within them.

The fact she thinks Tdap can cause pertussis is fitting. Megan, there is no pathogen in the Tdap Vaccine. It cannot cause pertussis. It’s just idiotic to make this claim. The “a” stands for Acellular.

Oh and OPV related polio is caused by immuno-compromised and unvaccinated children coming in contact with the excreted vaccine. It is incredibly rare. In 2011 in India there were 11 cases. Out of 1.2 billion.

And the Mumps outbreak paper listed explains what the issue is. Strain difference causes antigen difference. But you would know that if Megan could actually read the paper and understand it.

Logically and scientifically, I am having a really hard time blaming the chicken for the cow poop.

Except you don’t even know how we trace disease spreads and couldn’t read a paper that says in the first paragraph of the abstract that the issue is due to the vaccine strains not covering this wild type strain. It is embarrassing since I read papers like these when I was 15 in a better way than you do.

And the real tragedy is that you don’t realise ignorant you are on this topic.

They say vaccine herd immunity exists. But it doesn’t.

This comes from the assumption that vaccinated individuals all spread the disease in the same way that an infected person does which is simply untrue. In addition it shows a complete lack of understanding about the chain of transmission of disease.

It assumes that every member within a society is in constant contact with each other and that there are no barriers to movement. The best example of how the herd immunity works is from one of her own links.

Herd immunity 101: Herd immunity is the belief that if a certain portion of the population becomes immune to a disease the rest of the population will be protected from infection. Sounds great, except herd immunity only applies to diseases derived naturally that give one lifetime immunity. A vaccine is deemed effective if it introduces an antigen but that antigen may not cause an antibody response but if it does, won’t necessarily give one immunity, but if it does, only provides temporary immunity. In other words, effective doesn’t equal protective. You can have the antibodies and still get sick. Major fail.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sw1GgWWTCxs

The damage to the blood cells is done in seconds. Antibodies may not work 100% of the time and you may have a low titre of circulating antibodies so get sick but your immune system will produce an increased concentration rapidly and the severity of the disease will be lower.

I like how Megan has declared a rule to herd immunity. Natural immunity also wanes. The thing is with an unvaccinated society you keep being introduced to the disease so maintain your immunity. With vaccination you just have to take a booster to fulfil the same role. The simple rule here is “take your booster shots when you need to”.

There is no polite way to say this. This is like suggesting that we should all risk (bear in mind pre-vaccination numbers of Measles in the USA would causes 200 deaths a year with modern medicine and 300,000 hospitalisations) the mortality, morbidity and suffer the actual disease for a benefit that can be gained without any of that. And Measles immunity is not for life. There are children born in Measles endemic societies who get measles, move to first world nations where there is no Measles and get measles when they are older.

A.W. Hedrich, founder of the herd immunity concept found that a 68% exposure rate was all that was needed (not 95% as people have been mistakenly led to believe). By that definition, even if herd immunity did apply to vaccinations we should not see outbreaks of any vaccine preventable diseases especially in exclusively vaccinated areas. (For more on herd immunity check out this article and thisbook).

By Suzanne Humphries and Sherri Tenpenny. AKA The Idiots leading the fools.

Hedrich says that vaccination begins to show positive effects of the herd immunity at 65%, the thing is outliers still get sick. At 65% the effect of immunisation is a fall that is more than 65% in an incidence of a disease. At 95% you effectively destroy the chain of transmission. 1 in 20 people are un-vaccinated so if we assume an equal distribution? Each disease has only a 1 in 20 chance of spreading if we assume it’s spread rate is 100% (No disease has a 100% chance of transmission. Even the most virulent diseases rank in at 90 to 95%). The herd immunity is a walking quarantine. Few people fall sick and they cannot transmit the disease.

They don’t believe the body’s immune system serves any useful purpose. But it does. They say vaccines are one of the greatest public health achievements but they’re not. They say injecting 49 doses of 14 vaccines by age 6 is safe, but it’s not. They believe vaccines are the only way to prevent disease, but it’s not. They say “anti-vaccine activists” aren’t educated and haven’t done their research, but just because one comes to a different conclusion, doesn’t mean they haven’t. They say vaccines are science-based, while ignoring conflicting scientific studies.

It does serve a useful purpose. But we know that it needs a helping hand because it’s not perfect. Because pathogens also evolve.

Vaccines eliminated smallpox. If it wasn’t for anti-vax buying into this sort of bullshit and killing people like me who do work in places like Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nigeria we would have stamped out Polio too. We were stamping out Measles until Anti-vax scared people with bullshit.

I have more understanding of the human  immune system than any anti-vax. The dialogue is simple, if you get sick then you have done something wrong. Not that your body was beaten by it’s predator. Our predators are not lions or tigers but tiny creatures to whom we are nothing more than smorgasbord landscapes.

I have never said vaccines are the only way to prevent diseases. There are some things that can help such as sanitation but I know different diseases spread in different ways and that while sanitary toilets and clean drinking water reduce the spread of diarrhoea, the faeco-oral route can still be maintained by other methods and that vaccination does stop disease.

Anti-Vax aren’t educated. There is no competition here really, they have absolutely no understanding of physiology of human beings or microbiology and in this article alone I have shown the flaws in Megan’s argument. If one comes to a different conclusion we question their science. In order for Anti-Vax hypothesis to work the human body and pathogens and reality would have to function in an entirely different way.

Vaccines are scientifically proven to reduce disease. There is no contest, a vaccine eliminated Smallpox, Polio is next and Measles would be too if not for the actions of anti-vax.

So why are they lying to you? Pharmaceutical companies are doing it for profit, and are scared out of their minds of the liability that would fall upon them if vaccines were the admitted cause of any number of medical conditions (think asbestos and tobacco litigation).

Prior to the vaccination schemes in India out of every 1000 children born, 120 would die before their first year of life. Clean Drinking Water, Food and Toilets have their role, but the major heavy lifter was vaccines. These diseases once butchered our children and we made them go away.

And Megan wants them back. Megan thinks rabies is harmless or it can be cured by  herbs. I know that the only way to prevent rabies is through vaccintion. I know children who lived.

And I have seen Megan’s poison being clutched in the hands of a desperate mother weeping over her howling son because she desperately thought vaccines were bad and that the 8 shots were “too much”. She had to watch her son die painfully.

I had to do it too. And all this woman could say is “but they told me”.

Megan will never pay the price for her ignorance. The toll is paid by the people whose only crime was to open the wrong website one day and think Megan is an expert.

And a simple thing here. Each day of ICU can rack up $2,000 a day. Two weeks is $30,000 or so. Remind me again, which is cheaper? $30,000 and ICU care and physiotherapy? Or $12. Which is more profitable? I will give you a hint. $30,000.

Do you think there is no profit in encephalitis? 2 to 3 weeks in ICU? $45,000. Physiotherapy? What about permanent care? How much do you think that costs?

But that’s all moot. What cost can you put on the wasted potential caused by these diseases. These are thieves of youth. You may live but you will no longer have the opportunities you once had. They rob you of time if you are lucky, they rob you of your future if you are not.

And the joke here is this? I am poor. I am told repeatedly that I vaccinate for profit. I pay for vaccines out of my own pocket for those who cannot afford them. I am poor by International Standards. I earn $1 per 1000 hits. Guess what? I get around 2000 hits a day. $2?

I could earn more money flipping burgers. My patients earn more money than me and they are “third world poor”. I have stuff but that’s because I bought this when I had a serious job but frankly?

I keep getting promised big pharma cash but I never see an ounce of it. Or if Big Pharma wants to support some of my Charity Work, then they are welcome to go here.

The government won’t question because of their conflict of interests and profit margin. Some doctors don’t want to admit they’re wrong. Some people are looking for someone to blame. A few people truly think vaccines work and have made their choice but don’t think you have the right to make yours. And some people…hate others who don’t vaccinate more than they hate bad science.

The government makes a loss on vaccines. I don’t understand this logic. The government buys vaccines at $12 a shot, they get unspecified money from Big Pharma obviously more than $12 a shot otherwise it’s not a profit margin. Then my question is? How the hell are Big Pharma making money from vaccines because it seems like they spend a tonne of money making these then a tonne of money bribing everyone to use them. And again. Wink Wink… Nudge Nudge. Send a little sugar my way Merck. Help a poor doc out.

Cause this seems like a loss making scheme. You are paying people to use your drug which you are selling at a loss. Remind me again how do you make cash? I am a medical person but even I know enough that to make money you must spend less than you earn.

Like the original article suggests, I too encourage you to educate yourself. Of course there are parameters:

First, pretend that there is no split among the scientific community on this issue. Next, pretend that the hundreds of brilliant doctors and researchers who have spoken out against vaccines are all quacks. Then, pretend that vaccines are the only drugs in the world that conveniently have no harmful side-effects. And finally, if you don’t know where to start, look to the media, people who haven’t done their research, and random internet blogs that throw out citations that have absolutely nothing to do with their premise.

There is no split among the scientific community. The people who question vaccines are not real doctors and have no scientific understanding of the topic. OR worse? They are like “Dr” Mayer Eisenstein who I would trust to take care of Rescue Annie let alone a real human.

As the original article quoted, an astrophysicist once said “The good thing about science is that it’s true whether or not you believe in it.” Great quote, but might I point out that sometimes people refuse to acknowledge the real science because of what they believe.

Which is where I come back to my question on how the immune system functions. Because no anti-vax has given a correct answer. It’s always “just the non-specific immune system” and a diatribe about how they think that is more powerful.

I then ask them, why HIV patients (whose specific immune system is only affected) get so sick. They really have no answers.

The biggest victims of such quackery are the poorest and most desperate who are enticed by their promises of cheap treatments. The price of course is paid later.

And the thing to remember is this. There is no system of oversight for these quacks. If one of them does something wrong? Good luck! If I screw up, I know there is a system of punishments and tribunals that will give me and you a fair trial of the situation. If one of her natural medicine homeopaths screws up?

And they hurt my patients too, most know the difference. They have been at the hands of enough quacks to know that the “Allopath”/”Western” doctor may be more expensive but gets results. But the reason they have to experience it? People like Megan.