There's a great post titled McCarthyism over at sWell about Jenny McCarthy and her antivaccine campaign. She's recently turned up on a number of shows like Oprah and Larry King, venting her misguided spleen about the extremely improbable vaccine-autism connection. I would like to be charitable and think Jenny is just terribly misguided but her venom and rantings mark her as a charlatan. I long for the days when minor celebs could while away their autumn years on the panel of To Tell the Truth and, well, tell the truth. The current vogue is for these C-listers to manufacture a crisis then cash-in with memoirs and cures. Exhibit B would be Suzanne Somers.
And in the comments there is resentment against the "medical establishment" for dragging its collective feet on autism. The frustration is understandable if one has an autistic child. But progress in medicine can be maddeningly, frustratingly ponderous because medicine has to function as a science and work through problems incrementally, never embracing fads, setting up trials then allowing them to mature, replicating previous studies. Honestly, it can seem needlessly repetitive and cautious. But it's better than the converse - which is "chelation might work - let's try that". Advising patience is absolutely no comfort for the parent of an affected child, granted, but I don't see another way.
Paradoxically, the anti-vaccine movement is able to flourish largely because vaccines have been so successful that we rarely have to face these infectious threats in our daily lives. If significant numbers of children were succumbing to measles and polio, as they were decades ago, the cynics would be clamoring for vaccines. Hopefully we aren't headed in that direction again, as more opt out of vaccination. In a pluralistic democracy that values individual freedoms, should parents have the right to decline vaccination for their children. It's not a perfectly simple question and I'm not a philosopher but I think the greater good would tilt the argument toward mandatory vaccination.
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Kerry Lauerman
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As I also tell parents of unvaccinated children: "you are living off those of us who vaccinate our kids. Your chances of your kids getting those diseases is small, so you have the luxury of taking the risk." Oh, and by the way, we've had two major whooping cough outbreaks here in the past couple of years.
I have a friend that wrote a fantastic tome against random vaccination- she is an expert on vaccinations in New Zealand and her book is (slightly humorously) ' Just a Little Prick '
A bulletin of points:
1 There are chemicals in vaccinations that are highly contraversial, outside of mercury. Chemicals that are carcinogenic.
2 We have virtually no long term studies done on babies/toddlers immune systems. In point, we do not know how vaccinating our young with the amount and kind of vaccines we currently are will affect their adult health. We simply are, in effect, hoping it will be all right, because the trials in adults are. We don't do trials on children, for obvious reasons.
3 Diseases that there were not found vaccinations for disappeared. It is not only the ones we found the cure for that virtually vanished.
4 Many of the vaccinations that are given babies make no sense for their circumstances. If your baby is going to have sex or get blood transfusions or shoot up drugs, then I guess he or she needs the Hep B vaccine. Otherwise...? Chicken pox? Etc.
5 Too many parents fully vaccinate their children without knowing most anything about what they are putting into their child.
HPV vaccination has NO long term clinical trials. We have to look at the agencies records for mistakes. There are many deadly mistakes. HPV vac. could be shown to cause another kind of cancer, easily. A few young girls have died from it. (Look it up.)
ALSO-=
If you look at clusters of 'outbreaks' of disease, typically 80percent of the kids who had the disease WERE VACCINATED.
And to 2nd what others have already said: Diseases don't, by and large, just disappear. Things like bubonic plague don't show up in devastating pandemics anymore, primarily because of improved vector control and medical treatment. Countries that have resisted vaccination for disease (e.g. for Polio in parts of Nigeria) continue to have high rates of infection; the progression of the disease stops when a critical percentage of the population has been vaccinated.
Diseases also have their own life cycles. For instance, with influenza, seasonal epidemics are the norm; however, deadly pandemics (e.g. Spanish Flu during WWI), while unusual, have occurred regularly across human history. Thus the big panic over swine flu (70s) and bird flu (90s to now--the Spanish Flu was a type of bird flu that crossed species).
Diseases for which we don't have effective vaccines (e.g. HIV) continue to spread and mutate, resulting in new infections, vs just disappearing.
The antivaccination sites aggressively promote the appearance of controversy - using tactics remarkably similar to the antievolution crowd. Is there some sort of secret crackpot manual they all work from. Magpie, the only concurrence I can find with your points is the last one - parents should be aware of everything that goes into their children.
Did you know that many scientists who have disagreed with the vaccine trials and their safety have been 'let go' by the company?
How is there any oversight then?
Look up Dr. Anthony J. Morris, for example. He was let go after concluding after research with team: ' The benefit of flu vaccine was overrated. In children it often induced fever, in some pregnant women it endangered the fetus, in all users there was risk that the vaccine "literally loaded with extraneous bacteria" will be injected. Further, he said it was impossible to test the product (the vaccine) for potency.
Increasingly, American scientists were understanding taht they were expected to be state scientists- not rocking the boat or making independant findings.
Regarding vaccinating Hep B:
" While Mr. Milne was clear that vaccination of children was best in high-risk areas.... To vaccinate selected at risk groups is too hard to explain, and words cost time and money. By March 1988 it was obvious that in order to make the vaccine campaign nice and simple and sanitary, the KISS principle of just jab everyone, no matter the age, was being introduced.
Vaccines weren't always administered in this blind fashion. In 1930's when the diptheria vaccine first came on the market, the medical profession started testing everyone after finding high rates of serious reactions in those with pre-existing immunityi. The rates of natural immunity were quite high, and the first testing done in Auckland found 72.8% of children were immune. This is what was said about testing first:
'By using the Shick test...over 3000 injections have been avioded. This means a large saving financially while there is the satisfaction of knowing that unnecessary injections are avioded'
In any discussion involving science or medicine, citing Whale.to as a credible source loses you the argument immediately..and gets you laughed out of the room.
Morris proves the rule that for every trumped-up controversy, at least one credentialed expert can be found. The Intelligent Design movement has its Michael Behe, the Holocaust denialists have their David Irving, the AIDS denialists have Peter Duesbert (among others), and so on and so on...
Vaccine rejectionism is not about vaccines, and it is not about children. Vaccine rejectionism is about a certain group of parents and how they would like to see themselves. In the socially constructed world of vaccine rejectionists, risks can never be quantified and are always "unknown". Parents are divided into those (inferior) people who are passive and blindly trust authority figures and (superior) rejectionists who are "educated" and "empowered" by taking "personal responsibility".
The risks of vaccination are not unknown. Believing that vaccines work is not a matter of "trust"; it is reality. Questioning authority is not the same as being "educated"; indeed, it isn't even related. Lacking even basic knowledge of immunology and rejecting medical facts is not a sign of education, independent thinking or taking personal responsibility. It is a lack of education at best, and deliberate exposure of children to serious illness at worst.
It isn't anti-vaccine but it is critical of vaccines. We read the scientific literature and analyze it and then publish what we find.
Here is the fun part. We've been doing this since February of 2008. We've been begging all you pro-vaccine experts to tell us where we are wrong. But no luck. People come. They look. They read our articles. They go away again.
Frankly, I think most of you folks don't know anything about vaccines or vaccination.