I know the basic science, but the problem (so they tell us) is that the products are NOT safe and are not given at safe ages. Hepatitis B at birth?! Why? (That might be a good question) But not all vaccines are even efficacious. (How would we know that?) Plus we are making trivial diseases more dangerous. (We are?) You wonder why there are so many allergies and so much asthma in children? (Yes I do) And okay, why is autism astronomically increasing? WHY is it??? Watch this movie and then, yes, take a look further at the new film VAXXED.
(I did and I was taken, and taken in..and still am perplexed as to what the F is going on…Who is right and who is in the gd dark??? All i know is I have always believed in the science of vaccines, ever since I read about Jenner and cow pox as a child; way before Big Pharma had anything to do with anything. So I do not blame Jenner for anything…
Watch this movie but DO NOT CHECK YOUR REASON AT THE DOOR…Okay? Think, think think and question everything, then do your own research. Remember you are biassed even when you believe you are not. Do not take anything at face value or for granted…And question everything told to you as dogma. Especially when presented as DOGMATIC TRUTH but not backed by any proof. Remember: correlations are not causes.
SILENT EPIDEMIC: THE UNTOLD STORY OF VACCINES
WAGblog: Dum Spiro Spero 
Hi Pamela and cabrogal: I really enjoy the discussion here. I am also investigating the link between the MMR vaccine and autism. I recently dissected the famous article by Wakefield on my blog. Would love for you to check it out and perhaps share your comments.
http://wp.me/p7wme3-1G
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Hi Pam-interesting post. With regard to autism rates increasing, I’m researching that for my next blog post, but I believe the consensus is thus far, “no one knows for certain”. I recently wrote a post on vaccines including analyzing the paper by Wakefield and I would love for you to check it out and perhaps join in on the discussion.
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You’re more than welcome Pam.
I haven’t been spending much time on blogs lately – mine or others – but I’d been planning to do a post similar to your ‘Down With Doctors – Net Education Makes Physicians of All of Us’ for some time. Thanks for covering the ground.
In particular I wanted to make the point you did that the main function GPs serve these days is to act as gatekeepers to medical resources – especially pharmaceuticals. Over the decade I spent in Asia – where I could buy almost any legal drug over the counter – I did perfectly well as my own doctor. I only needed to see medicos once – to get a blood test confirming the malaria infection I already strongly suspected I had. Anti-malaria drugs can be nasty so I wanted to be sure before I started treatment.
And if you’ve got a chronic or recurrent illness chances are you will soon learn more about it than your GP or even your specialist does. As I told an opthamologist who tried to slap down my (correct) self-diagnosis of iritis a few months ago “OK doctor, you’ve studied and treated iritis for over 20 years. I’ve lived it for over 20 years. Has it occurred to you there might be two experts in this room?”.
As most GPs will be quick to tell you, the internet is full of medical information – much of it false or misleading. That means you have to subject it to serious critical analysis. What fewer GPs seem to be aware of is that their journals are also full of misleading information. And many of them get their CME from drug reps anyway.
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I wanted to thank you, Cabrogal, for taking so much time to write so clearly here. Obviously I was in a fugue state from rationality when I saw the movie VAXXED etc! I wwould take this whole post down but for your comments which add so much to the discussion that I want to keep the whole damn thing here…Hoping someone will read them and see the light as I did. Thank you again. Pamela
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Yes, propaganda movies like VAXXED do say stuff like that over and over again don’t they. As Josef Goebbels noted, if you repeat a lie often enough people will start to believe it. The problem with there position is not that single vaccinations don’t cause autism – which is true – but that MMR doesn’t cause autism either. And there is no evidence MMR is any more dangerous than single antigen vaccinations.
Real risks from any injection of foreign protein include poor needle or injection site hygiene and anaphylaxis. By breaking up vaccinations from one to three shots parents are tripling real and measurable risks to avoid one that has never been shown to exist.
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I was in a hurry yesterday and posted some stuff without properly checking. Sorry about that.
Meta-analysis of the epidemiological studies into autism rates unvaccinated vs vaccinated kids is sensitive to 1:2.2 million, not 1:25 million as I wrote.
And the links to the studies aren’t from the 14 studies page. They’re here
http://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/481371
BTW, note that one of the studies cited here found a possible link between vaccinations of pregnant women – a practice long contraindicated in all but extraordinary circumstances but still carried out by some practitioners – and subsequent autism in the child. Yet for some reason anti-vaxxers (as well as pro-vaxxers of course) have neglected to highlight this real risk from vaccines in favour of crying wolf over a non-existent danger.
Yeah, Big Pharma lies for the sake of profits. It’s been intrinsic to their business model since wagons flogging snake oil toured the Old West. But the fact is that profits from typical childhood vaccines – unlike those from Gardasil, SSRIs or atypical antipsychotics – are tiny. If you flog Depakote off-label as treatment for bipolar and Alzheimers you can absorb the billions of dollars in fines and bad publicity when you’re caught and still make a profit. Not so with the MMR vaccine. In fact all vaccines in total (including blockbusters like Gardasil and flu shots) account for less than 2% of pharmaceutical company revenues and barely 1.5% of profits. It’s still big money of course, but not big enough to justify the massive conspiracy anti-vaxxers apparently believe in.
On the other hand, treatment for acute measles infections represents a potential bonanza for Big Pharma. So it would be in their interests to discourage people from being vaccinated.
Perhaps anti-vaxxers should apply to drug companies for funding.
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Before vaccination that ‘vanishingly rare’ statistic killed 15-30 kids in the US every year. Now it kills less than five per decade.
And as there is zero evidence that MMR causes autism I think we got the best of that ‘trade’.
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Err, documented by who Pam?
Here’s the research
http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/content/165/6/704.full
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9154545
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That’s an argument for vaccination.
If your immune system is already primed by vaccines when the pathogen invades it will throw off the infection sooner, giving them less time to mutate and adapt.
Yeah, ‘evidence based’ medicine is badly fucked up due to the ‘suppression’ of negative studies. Many aren’t actively suppressed but just remain unpublished because the journals consider negative findings uninteresting, but many others are deliberately suppressed in part or full. As you’d know, studies of psychiatric medications tend to be particularly bad in this regard.
But there are plenty of negative studies of vaccines out there, as there are positive ones. Wakefield’s study that kicked off the whole ‘vaccines cause autism’ hysteria was published in perhaps the world’s most prestigious medical journal despite the fact it was fraudulent and involved the abuse of the human rights of the children who were studied. The big problem is the same one we just saw in the US elections. The two sides of the public debate are so polarised they simply ignore evidence that doesn’t support their position and lie about the evidence they choose to discuss.
One of the reasons I’m down on the anti-vaxxers is because by elevating frauds like Wakefield into courageous martyrs they bring real criticalist researchers – like David Healy or Irving Kirsch – into disrepute by association (I dislike the Scientologist’s CCHR for the same reason, despite the fact they managed to shut down the most abusive psychiatric hospital in Australia).
And the main reason I’m down on the pro-vaxxers is because by misrepresenting medical science as practically infallible they promote cynicism about real medical advances and drive many towards quackery – both alternative and allopathic.
No, Australia has no president. Our head of government is a prime-minister who isn’t directly elected but chosen by his or her party. Often the party changes the prime-minister between elections. The head of state is the governor-general, who is selected by the Queen of England and is directly responsible to her. In 1975 our unelected governer-general dismissed our elected government at the instigation of the opposition, the White House and influential business figures, but he had to get permission from Buckingham Palace to do so.
But despite the fact our ‘democracy’ is a joke I’m sure glad I don’t live in the US. Your country – especially California – is Bullshit Central when it comes to science and religion.
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A couple of years ago I came across a site that was arguing the pros and cons of vaccines. The more I read, the more confused I became. Both sides seem so reasonable. Both sides seem unreasonable at times, too.
After doing some armchair internet research on my own, and weighing it all out, I decided: no more flu shots, pneumonia shots, etc, for this old woman. But the children… and my great grandchildren! Heaven help us!!
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One thing that the movie VAXXED says over and over again, or at least the chief “operators” in it say, is that vaccines singly do not seem to cause major problems, at least not Mumps, alone, measles, or Rubella alone, those single vaccines given each one by one, on separate occasions seem to do little damage, in terms of being linked to the high fever and seizures that parents — thousands of them — report result in a healthy baby shortly thereafter “coming down:” very suddenly with autism…(Please don’t critique my language there…I know what is wrong with it..) but the thing is, there is something apparently wrong with the three given together, either in the preparation itself, the MMR vaccine and the chemistry of it, or the trio of vaccines given together…Because if your example of the one child in ten thousand who gets or dies of mumps is serious, then you surely would take seriously a side effect so bad that tens of thousands of parents, who surely are the best observers of their children around, have complained that nearly immediately after being vaccinated with this triple immunization, their child deteriorated in a fashion that they jointly recognized, and subsequently was diagnosed as autistic. This is not the 1 in 10,000 baby that would have been autisitic anyway but new isolated autism in babies that statistically should have remained well. With no co-morbidities what so ever…
My and VAXXED point here is only that at one point these vaccines were available singly, and worried mothers were availing themselves and their children of them, until the drug companies (with whose encouragement???) took them off the market entirely, leaving ONLY MMR to provide immunity and a government that mandated childhood vaccination! Now if I am a conspiracy theorist, then maybe it is because this was something that was actually plotted in advance in order to force mothers to use the MMR…?
Note: It is said that Andrew Wakefield;s small paper on gasttrointestinal disease and autistic children was fraudulent but it has been shown that the entire paper “proving” the absolute NON-link of MMR to autism was not just junk science, but created simply to bolster the use of MMR, not that it was ever proven to be safe or not linked.
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Okay, I went to the site you suggested for the Summary and this is what I found right at the front page and I copied and pasted it, for proof: By reading and analyzing every published study used to “prove” vaccines do not cause autism, this website will show you that:
– No real world studies of the vaccine schedule have ever been done. Of the 11 separate vaccines given to American children (many given multiple times), only one vaccine — the MMR — has ever been studied for its relationship to autism. Yet, American children get 6 or 7 different vaccines simultaneously at 2, 4, 6, and 12 month doctor appointments.
– Not one study compares vaccinated children to unvaccinated children — every study only looks at children who have received vaccines. This is like comparing smokers who smoke one pack a day to those who smoke two packs a day, seeing no difference in cancer rates, and saying cigarettes don’t cause cancer.
– The studies are rife with conflicts including authors who have been paid by vaccine companies and federal agencies and foreign governments charged with administering vaccines.
– Many of the studies reach false conclusions or conclusions that have nothing to do with the simple question: do vaccines cause autism? They are simply being misrepresented in the press by public health officials taking advantage of a docile media that is heavily dependent on advertising from pharma companies.
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1 in 10,000 mumps cases is statistically vanishingly rare… of course I feel for the individual but autism used to be that unheard of too! So now we have traded mumps for autism?!
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It was documented that the MMR vaccine induced meningitis…because of this it was taken off the market in Europe and Britain but subsequently marketed ( with predictable results) in other shall we say “vulnerable ” countries and continents…. now the most vulnerable of all get the MMR vaccines — children 12-18 months old….and they suffer consequences
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Go to Google Scholar and type in ‘vaccination autism epidemiological’ and you’ll find the papers. Or you can go to this site (among many others) for a summary.
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“Booster shots are no stronger than initial vaccinations and the mechanism is entirely unrelated to the development of antibiotic resistance. In the latter it’s the pathogen that develops new ways to overcome the medication. In the former it’s the patient whose immune system slowly loses the disease fighting antigens it develops in response to the vaccine and needs a ‘top up’.” That is not exactly true. In fact from what I’ve been reading these pathogens do precisely what all pathogens have to do when thwarted by a hosts immune system or by antibiotics : they mutate into different and more resistant forms that resist i.e. Make those people sick despite the vaccination… moreover, because vaccination has never been shown in ANY of these latter diseases to be 100% effective (developers go on the polio model and boost their vaccines as if that effective but have zero proof of this efficacy) — and if these annual flu vaccines are any demo then you have some idea from that just how varying the degree of immunity they provide in fact, — my point is as with all drugs these days and I mean virtually every drug on the market since the 1970s all negative research and unpublished studies have been suppressed so valiantly and deliberately as to make the notion of calling it drug or vaccine research absurd! Look into that before you start trusting these vaccines or any drug you take!
Ps I thought you were in Australia– no? Doesn’t Australasian have a president? Welp my humble apologies on both fronts– that was not meant as an affront in any event I just meant to say in general don’t trust your leaders!! The official ones that is… whatever their title… if you have someone decent — argh!! I don’t trust any one at this point but what kin I say? I live in the original evil empire as far as I am concerned!!! My best to you and again my apologies for getting hot under the collar…You don’t deserve it at all. Pam
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Where have you ever seen a study done between the rates of vaccinated and unvaccinated autistic children?
> “There is no negative space, only the shapely void. Hold your hands out, cup the air. To see the emptiness you hold is to know that space loves the world.” P. Wagner
>
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But a difference in the rate of autism among vaccinated compared to unvaccinated kids can’t be detected even with studies that would pick it up at a rate of one in 25 million. I call that subtle.
And if I was a parent of one of the one in 10,000 mumps patients who die from it (or the others who suffer permanent brain damage) I sure wouldn’t be calling it trivial. A relative of mine died of mumps in the 1950s.
And of course whooping cough and measles are even more dangerous than mumps.
Booster shots are no stronger than initial vaccinations and the mechanism is entirely unrelated to the development of antibiotic resistance. In the latter it’s the pathogen that develops new ways to overcome the medication. In the former it’s the patient whose immune system slowly loses the disease fighting antigens it develops in response to the vaccine and needs a ‘top up’.
The reason SIDS spiked in the 60s, 70s and 80s was due to one man. Dr Benjamin Spock. He wrote a wildly successful book in which he advised mothers to put infants to sleep on their bellies – a measure which vastly increases the risk of SIDS. The error was discovered in the late 80s and since then mothers have been advised to sleep infants on their backs. The result? SIDS rates have now fallen to the lowest levels since records started.
The reasons for the increase in autism diagnoses are hard to pin down, but you of all people Pam should be aware of at least one of them. It’s the same reason diagnoses of depression, bipolar and schizophrenia have gone through the roof. Diagnostic inflation. In the 1960s you had to be seriously disabled to get an autism diagnosis whereas now you can get one due to relatively mild behavioural or psychosocial deviation. I should know. I’ve been diagnosed on the spectrum myself. But other possible reasons for the increase would include the huge increase in environmental industrial chemicals since WWII. A lot of things have changed since the 1930s Pam, not just vaccination rates.
And my country has no President.
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By the way, I don’t consider 1 in 50 children being autistic to be SUBTLE in any fashion!
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I do not deny the small pox and polio successes. I do think that your own words should reflect some cautions back to you. What makes you think we have learned A THING from our failures one, and two, are you aware that vaccinating for essentially trivial diseases like mumps etc, which confers only TEMPORARY immunity and even some STDs but come back to bite in ever stronger forms, which is why ever stronger booster shots are required, is the same process that produced Antibiotic resistant TB? Why do you think we now have such a huge increase of childhood and infant asthma and allergies where we used to by habit build our immunity to allergens by living? Are you aware of the ingredients in these vaccines and the allergenic potential, and what they do to preemies, to whom they are routinely given? Why has SIDS suddenly, since the 70s become a problem? Is it possible that at birth vaccinations can be linked? THINK about these things. I am not so stupid as to believe that correlation IS causation, but sometimes the two are indeed causally linked, sometimes there is a profoundly cause and effect linkage, and when autism was once a 1 in 10,ooo occurrence in the 1930s but now is reaching rates of 1 in 50 someone needs to recognize NO GENETIC cause lies behind such a rapid rate change, no, somehting environmental is causing this. And unless you can tell me and others who are so concerned for these children just what it is, I advise you to do some research into the ideas that this movie and VAXXED discusses, before you mouth the cant and propaganda that the govt had fed you…RESEARCH It, don’t just tell me the same lies that I could mouth to you. I already know them,. I also know that pharmaceutical companies and the government lie about nearly everything, so why in gods name would I ever take their word for this one thing>???? Jesus, no, in the children’s name and for their sake, get some sense in your brain and think about this! Someone is lying to YOU and to ALL of you who actually believe that the nice sweet President of your country and mine just happens to want to tell us the truth in this one case? Where is your critical thinking?? Sorry to be so strident, but NO ONE is really thinking here. Just reacting. And thinking that WE are anti scientific when it its YOUR side that is Anti-science. YOU!
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Well Pam, the first thing that needs to be made clear is that if there is any link at all between childhood vaccines and autism it is so incredibly subtle that several of the biggest epidemiological studies ever carried out have been unable to detect it. You’re talking about risks that must be smaller than one in tens of millions here. You’re probably more likely to be killed by a meteorite. On the other hand the likelihood that such vaccines will save your child’s life or protect her from brain damage due to infections is many orders of magnitude higher. So people who refuse to vaccinate their kids for fear of autism are seriously deluded and putting their children at unnecessary risk of death or permanent disability.
But yeah, there are dangers to vaccines – as with any medications – and the way they are promoted and rolled out is often irresponsible.
A few examples.
The Gardasil vaccine for HPV was implemented on a huge scale without the usual level of testing you’d expect for such a major public health initiative. The fact that it induces anaphylactic reactions at many times the rate of other childhood vaccines (albeit still very low) was essentially kept from the parents and young women who were expected to make informed decisions about taking it and no-one knew how long the protection from HPV would last or what other mid to long term effects it might have. As it turns out the data so far is looking good and it seems to be offering good protection from several cancers to many people with no significant downsides detected yet. It’s looking like public health officials won the gamble they were taking with other people’s lives but luck rather than good science or precautionary principles deserves a lot of the credit for that. And it’s hard to escape the suspicion Gardasil was rushed into distribution because at least one competing HPV vaccine was ready to be rolled out.
During the 2006 Swine Flu scare a vaccine was rushed into distribution and widely used on Australians during early summer (i.e. the low risk season for flu) essentially without testing. It was later found to be almost ineffective but that’s OK because the strain of swine flu was nowhere near as dangerous as the media was pretending and the feared epidemic never materialised. In 1976 many Americans were not so lucky. Another baseless swine flu scare resulted in a hastily developed vaccine being administered on a large scale with insufficient testing. One person died of the flu. Dozens died from the vaccine and hundreds developed Guillain–Barre syndrome from it. Thirty years later public health officials demonstrated they had learned nothing from the 1976 debacle.
And during the first American-led war against Iraq many service personnel suffered bad reactions to an untested vaccine meant to protect them from Saddam’s anthrax weapons. Many of them have subsequently developed debilitating chronic illnesses, though it’s far from clear the vaccine was the cause. Saddam never deployed any anthrax weapons.
There have been other cases where poor manufacturing techniques, quality control, storage and dispensing (especially poor needle hygiene) have led to vaccination programs that have caused more death, disease and injury than they prevented – especially in Africa – but overall vaccines have been one of the biggest success stories of modern medicine. Smallpox is gone, polio is on the ropes and many of the childhood diseases that killed or disabled thousands of children only a few generations ago are now quite rare in the West. But that doesn’t mean we should let our guards down when it comes to the unscrupulous drug companies and irresponsible or incompetent public health officials who administer them. And it doesn’t justify the position taken by many vaccine evangelists who would have us believe there is no danger in them whatsoever.
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