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[GavJ]

It's rare a vaccine will cause any actual damage. Sometimes you'll have an allergic reaction, or maybe you'll get ill from it, but the fact of the matter is that neither of these is as serious or widespread as the disease being vaccinated against, otherwise we'd not use it at all.

Claim #1 above: Yeah I'm sure it's rare, but so what? When you're weighing rare things against rare things, just saying it's rare doesn't mean anything. Rare things still matter in that situation!

Claim #2 above: The whole point of the thread is that there isn't sufficient evidence to say that. Simply re-stating it without any more or different or any evidence is not a very strong counterargument...

Better to educate them that taking a little bit of time out of their lives is better than ending up permanently paralysed for the rest of your life.

Similarly, this description is taking for granted without sufficient evidence that the result of a vaccine is only ever "taking a bit of time" (and not potentially life threatening complications), while the result of not is going to be horrible results all the time (whereas in reality most of these diseases in addition to being rare have very low really bad outcome rates). The whole point is that's not very scientific to just throw out spin like that without actually evenly considering the two...

[Graknorke]

I have never heard of someone suffering permanent damage to their nervous system because of a vaccine. Just saying.

Unless you're going to say that one person dying is better than 100 people being uncomfortable, I'm not sure where you're trying to take this.

[Gentlefish]

I have never heard of someone suffering permanent damage to their nervous system because of a vaccine. Just saying.

Unless you're going to say that one person dying is better than 100 people being uncomfortable, I'm not sure where you're trying to take this.

Okay maybe there was that one time with a menincoccal meningitis vaccine with some live bugs. But.

[GavJ]

I have never heard of someone suffering permanent damage to their nervous system because of a vaccine. Just saying.

I look forward to you publishing this new game-changing data in a medical journal near me in the coming months. 

Unless you're going to say that one person dying is better than 100 people being uncomfortable, I'm not sure where you're trying to take this.

No, I'm saying that 9,999,999 people not getting sick or getting sick and being uncomfortable but surviving and one person getting sick and dying is equally as bad as 9,999,999 being uncomfortable and one person having a severe vaccine reaction and dying.

[alway]

Measles was already steadily on the decline prior to a vaccine being developed (presumably due to improving care, education, sanitation, cheap fever reducers, etc.). The vaccine absolutely accelerated the decline a lot, but there was still an existing decline. It is logical to predict that even without a vaccine, this decline would have continued over time, and that with today's medical infrastructure, measles incidence and death rate would be very far below their 1960s levels.

For someone demanding everyone give evidence for obvious things, you sure are making some pretty huge assertions without evidence there. Especially given we've seen exactly the opposite. In places with low vaccination? It is coming back. Outbreaks are occurring, and in greater numbers, specifically in places where idiots don't get vaccinated.

[Leafsnail]

Section 5 is seriously hurting my brain.  As far as I can tell your argument runs:
- It may be that the optional vaccination level is not 100%
- I can't be bothered to do any research or calculations to work out what this level is
- Therefore herd immunity doesn't exist

You're aware that there's a critical threshold of vaccination coverage that prevents outbreaks, right?  Like, let's imagine you have a disease that (on average) is spread to 20 new people per carrier.  If over 95% of the population is vaccination then on average you'll have less than one infection resulting from that disease, and it will burn out quickly.  If you have less coverage than that then the number of people infected will grow exponentially, you'll get major outbreaks and a lot of people will die.

Since this threshold is generally pretty high "vaccinate everyone that can be vaccinated" is generally a safe bet.

It's rate of death vs. rate of death. The few months of life in between being old enough or not is negligible for considering value of life (you might have an argument if it were some 50 year old weighing their life against a baby, but that's not how it goes down)

Except you've missed the key point of the example: choosing not to vaccinate is not a decision that only affects you, or your child.  Your decision to not vaccinate could lead to the death of someone unrelated to you, or could contribute to a society that allows outbreaks which kill a lot of people.  Thus no, it is not acceptable to only consider risk factors to yourself/your child when your decision will actually affect others, and indeed the whole society you live in.

In addition you seem not to understand the concept of the "free rider problem", and how there are times when every person acting selfishly causes harm overall.

[LordBucket]

I have never heard of someone suffering permanent damage to their nervous system because of a vaccine. Just saying.

Unless you're going to say that one person dying is better than 100 people being uncomfortable, I'm not sure where you're trying to take this.

It does happen. Even the CDC acknowledges vaccines can have side effects that "sometimes include serious injury and death." This is why systems like VAERS exist.

For example:

Swineflu
"The strain itself killed one person and hospitalized 13. However, side-effects from the vaccine are thought to have caused five hundred cases of Guillain–Barré syndrome and 25 deaths."

Gardasil
" vaccine that, by the summer of 2009, already caused more than 15,000 thousand reports of vaccine reactions, including more than 3,000 injuries and 48 deaths."

Sure, vaccines might not cause "serious harm or death" often, but they do cause it sometimes. But when weighing that "sometimes" against, say...smallpox, or polio or things that can devastate entire populations, it's easy to look at the numbers and conclude that it might be better to kill one in a million and give one in 50,000 brain damage with vaccines, than to have millions of people die or be permanently crippled from something like polio.

But on the other hand, getting an annual flu shot to avoid a couple days of sniffling might not be worth that risk.

[Leafsnail]

Something else to consider is the long-term benefits of disease eradication - that way people in the future won't need to accept the risk of the vaccine or the disease, like with Smallpox.

But on the other hand, getting an annual flu shot to avoid a couple days of sniffling might not be worth that risk.

Indeed, that's why those vaccines are generally targeted at elderly people who are likely to die as a result of flu.

[Cheeetar]

What's with the measles bump in the 90s?

[LordBucket]

that's why those vaccines are generally targeted at elderly people who are likely to die as a result of flu.

In my part of the world, it seems like it's more about money-making than public welfare. Flu vaccination stands set up in front of grocery stores in the same places that girl scouts sell cookies.



It's one thing to vaccinate children against the measles and mumps. It's one thing to eradicate polio. It's another thing entirely to turn it into a business and market to people that they need to get vaccinated regularly so you can make a profit off of them.

[Leafsnail]

I've got an article about the 1989-1991 resurgence
http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/551272_5
Apparently it occurred mainly in pre-school children, and it's what led to the MMR vaccine being administered to people at a younger age.

http://i.imgur.com/pHqkj9c.png
One would expect the green line to continue on its own with advancing care, which would suggest that the vaccines aren't really doing all that much nowadays.

Yes let's just assume a (very weak) linear trend will go on forever, that's always a valid assumption.  By the way did you know that everyone will soon own 50 smartphones each?

In my part of the world, it seems like it's more about money-making than public welfare. Flu vaccination stands set up in front of grocery stores in the same places that girl scouts sell cookies.

http://e-volvedliving.com/living/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/DSC03942.jpg

It's one thing to vaccinate children against the measles and mumps. It's one thing to eradicate polio. It's another thing entirely to turn it into a business and market to people that they need to get vaccinated regularly so you can make a profit off of them.

Yeah for-profit medicine is pretty scummy.

[GavJ]

#1 I struggle to find ANY sources that aren't 'You should avoid vaccinations because they will rape your dog!' levels of crazy. Equally, I have yet to find anything else saying that there have actually been any widely-distributed non-clinically trialled vaccines that have been dangerous.

What you are describing here is "I don't have any evidence [of vaccines causing actual damage]." Which I agree with.
What you said before was a strong causal claim that "Vaccines rarely cause actual damage."
Those two statements are not at all equivalent. You (or anybody) simply not having proof of something in your hands =/= it not existing.

A lack of clearevidence for damage is a necessary STARTING point, but not the whole game. What you have to do next to be valid scientifically is just go out and run a whole ****load of research subjects, in order to establish that "Well, whatever the rate of ___ complication is, if it exists, we at least know it's below such and such an amount based on the statistical power of our study" until you are able to make that claim at a rate below the known benefits of the treatment, at which point, and ONLY at which point you can confirm for sure that the treatment is worth it.

This is fairly easy to do if the risk is something like heart surgery, where you only have to establish lower than a pretty high rate of risk for the benefits to outweigh it. But with vaccines, the marginal benefits are so small in places like the US now that all of the studies use populations that are extremely smaller than the necessary comparison threshold (which is the case), which means you cannot currently say that the treatment is worth it here and now.

For example, a reaction to Polio. A few people will die, it's inevitable because that stuff just happens. But What would you prefer? Possible paralysis for the rest of your life and possibly death vs. possible temporary... well, lots of things (possibly) and a lower possibility of death?

My preference regarding paralysis? Well I'm not sure, because rate of paralysis hasn't clearly changed in a consistent way.

As you can see here from WHO data above, started out looking pretty decent (although note the huge drop for years at the beginning with hardly any vaccination, which hints at fresh water distribution in major population areas recently, etc. as a factor), but then later in direct correlation with vaccination rates, polio cases declined and "non-polio acute flaccid paralysis" rates shot up.

Is this proof of anything? No. Reporting officers went up too, but not in a way that fully explains that steady continually climbing trend or its full shape (also reporting officers were much more concerned about reporting polio). Nebulous, unclear, quasi-questionable in terms of the definitions they might be using... this is exactly what I'm talking about.

This kind of sketchiness stretches all the way back to the 1950s original campaigns. Shortly after the release of the salk vaccine, for instance, they massively changed the definition of polio from requiring only paralysis observation on two occasions 24 hours apart to requiring observations of paralysis BOTH 10-20 days after other symptom onset and 50-70 days apart.

Which is fine in itself to tighten standards, except when you go places like Wikipedia and see statements like:

In the U.S, following a mass immunization campaign promoted by the March of Dimes, the annual number of polio cases fell from 35,000 in 1953 to 5,600 by 1957.

i.e. spanning both sides of the definition change... and since data more precise than the original definition doesn't exist, thus including essentially ALL paralysis by any means on one side, versus only poliomyelitis on the other...

The more you look into it, the more it becomes pretty clear it was a bunch of statisticians running around like chickens with their heads cut off throwing out random "data" with totally different meanings and scant accountability.

I'm not suggesting they were corrupt or conspiratorial. I'm just suggesting the data is crap and tells you almost nothing you want to know, and continues to be like that. Here's a snapshot of WHO data from 2000:


30,625 cases of AFP
2,971 polio cases
719 wild virus polio cases

Several issues here:
1) What are the other 2,971 - 719 = 2,252 polio cases from, if not wild polio...? Are these just unknown? Or is some (unreported) percentage of these vaccine-induced polio cases? If so, what percentage, and how does it compare to otherwise expected incidence rates? If some percentage is, and if it is approaching or higher than 719, would that suggest a different optimal vaccination rate? Even if none of that number IS vaccine-induced polio, where are the numbers that ARE? Shouldn't we be keeping track of that?
2) Why do we care about polio so much when it represents only 2% of acute flaccid paralysis cases?
3) Why should we trust a vaccine that reduces a disease that consists of a tiny minority of the symptoms we actually care about, yet correlates at the same time with a significant increase in reported cases of the other remaining huge majority of paralysis cases? Shouldn't we be... like... at least running more studies on that to see if it's an actual effect (which we are not doing)?

For someone demanding everyone give evidence for obvious things, you sure are making some pretty huge assertions without evidence there. Especially given we've seen exactly the opposite. In places with low vaccination? It is coming back. Outbreaks are occurring, and in greater numbers, specifically in places where idiots don't get vaccinated

Where exactly are you talking about? Do you have maps, etc.?

Note also that I said "very far below 1960s levels" (and thus potentially requiring a recalibration of general risk/reward compared to initial efforts) not "nonexistent."

Yes let's just assume a (very weak) linear trend will go on forever, that's always a valid assumption.  By the way did you know that everyone will soon own 50 smartphones each?

Did you not click on the very next image I had in that same post addressing exactly this response ahead of time?

[Tiruin]

. . .
Could I ask where these ideas of not having vaccines benefiting you stemmed from? As in, direct causes.
Because I'm very against the [perceived essence] of this thread as it is.

[TamerVirus]

Let's all be frank here, what's the point of this thread?

I'm certain you have your set beliefs against vaccination, as other have in favor of vaccination.

Whats the point of all this? Debate?

[Tiruin]

What's the main question of this thread, seems better.

Is this a question on the credibility of vaccines?