A reminder to Americans with short fucking memories.
The number of anti-vaccination cranks out there on the interwebs seems to be multiplying. It seems you can’t make reference to any kind of vaccination lately without people, sometimes pretending to be liberals (sometimes actually misguided liberals) wailing and moaning about how terrible vaccinations are. It’s the new fluoridation. I’m somewhat surprised that no one wailed and moaned that I mentioned on Pandagon a tetanus vaccination I got the other day, but rest assured, while my arm has been kind of sore, I haven’t yet developed autism.
I have very little patience for cranks as a general rule (which is why working for this site is so fun, because it’s about pushing back against anti-choice cranks), but I reserve a special contempt and loathing for anti-vaccination cranks. They remind me of nothing so much as women who make their living as professional anti-feminists in terms of denial and idiocy levels. Anti-feminist professional women create a special kind of loathing, because they don’t acknowledge that their very ability to be out there earning a paycheck lambasting feminism would not be possible without feminism giving them the right to be women in the public sphere. Anti-vaccination cranks have a similar parasitic relationship to the existence of vaccines. If it weren’t for vaccination, our country would have far more immediate infectious disease health concerns to worry about that the largely imaginary health drawbacks of the vaccination wouldn’t have a chance to ruffle any feathers.
Anti-vaccination cranks make me see red, in no small part because there’s no excuse for the levels of ignorance they demonstrate about the real value of vaccines. It would be more understandable if the invention of the polio vaccination, for instance, was so far in the past that there were no survivors of the disease hanging around being reminders of how terrible it really is. But there are plenty of people who had the disease that are around, suffering the lifelong effects of even the minor cases that would have allowed you to reach middle age after suffering that disease in your youth. I for one am incredibly grateful to have never known anyone with small pox, tetanus or even the fucking mumps my whole life.
Like all good cranks, anti-vaccination assholes move the goal posts constantly. The big hobbyhorse of anti-vaccination cranks is autism rates (even though the connection between autism and vaccinations has been thoroughly debunked), but of course, the invention of the HPV vaccine hasn’t passed notice, though you get that when you’re like 12 years old, so even if you believe childhood vaccinations have something to do with autism (which you shouldn’t), then you should realize that 12 is way too late to “develop” autism. But it’s this lightening rod because it’s new and it’s sex-related and thus the cranks can hang their hat on it, and get all excited about building a coalition between the usual anti-vaccination cranks and the sexphobes, getting more power.
And of course, the invocations of “Big Pharma” do not an argument make. It’s childish to think that something is an unvarnished, irredeemable evil just because someone made money doing it. Big Pharma does a lot of wrong things, but mainly because they charge too much for products that are actually good. If they were charging too much for products that were just crap, then they’d be no more a political problem than people who make designer handbags. The abstinence-only assholes resort to screaming “Big Pharma” to discourage women from taking the birth control pill, which shows what kind of crankery you’re getting into with that tactic.
Like all good cranks, evidence that conflicts with their theories is simply ignored. The idea behind the autism-vaccination link was that the mercury used in some vaccinations caused autism. Well, they don’t use mercury in childhood vaccinations anymore and haven’t for awhile, but autism rates remain high. Maybe the vaccinations are causing autism out of tradition, then? There’s a theory that kosher laws against the eating of pork were initially developed for health reasons, but were kept out of tradition after the health reasons disappeared. Is that how vaccines do it?
Promoting the idea that there’s these non-existent connections between vaccinations and autism and other ill health effects is vicious and cruel to parents whose children are suffering from the diseases that are claimed to be caused by vaccinations. I can’t imagine how much a parent with an autistic child would suffer from guilt if she actually believed this bullcrap, because after all, it was she who got the child vaccinated. All needless—they may not know what causes autism, but I’m going to bet that if they ever do find out, it’s probably going to be genetic and not something that parents could have known or prevented.
Maybe what bothers me the most is that the opposition to vaccinations tends to play into this knee-jerk Luddite mentality. Not that I don’t think new technologies shouldn’t be carefully examined to see if they do more good than harm, and that things that prove to be problems like cars should be seriously reconsidered. But a lot of people don’t want to do the hard work of taking each new technology and its issues and problems on for itself, and instead just want this general “new is bad/old ways were better” rule that they can apply indiscriminately. The traditionalism fallacy infects people on the right and the left both, though often in different ways. For instance, when conservatives decry the “unnatural”, they’re referring to sodomy or women getting paychecks, and when liberals do it, they’re probably talking about medications. Of course, some conservatives are beginning to see the benefits of embracing the knee-jerk hostility to modern medicine, at least when it applies to women, because of the contraception thing.* Anti-vaccination crankery doesn’t make much sense outside of this knee-jerk hostility to innovation and science.
The irony here is that scientists really aren’t trying to conquer the imperfect body at all. Vaccination technology actually makes more sense if you realize it came from a place of great respect for the the complexity of life, and the careful study of defenses that had evolved in the body. Which is why I love vaccinations. They work with the pre-existing environment. The real wow factor is that the body responds so well and so predictably to the vaccination. In one sense, it’s a bit alarming that I extended my arm the other day to be shot up with a syringe-full of dead bacteria that would, if alive, kill me pretty damn dead, but it was no big deal at all, because I trusted my body’s immune system to kick into action and do its job. So who’s the one that’s really trusting nature to do what it does best?
*None of this is to say that I’m opposed to the midwifery movement or anything. When they argue for it on pragmatic terms—it’s less expensive and less invasive, for instance—I’m all ears. Because that’s the point of this whole rant. If you got the evidence, you got an argument. But when people start waxing about how it’s more natural and that’s how they did it in the old days, I think “menstrual huts” and wonder why people seem to think that undernourished, illiterate people who didn’t get out much from the past were somehow magically smarter than we are now.
171 Responses to “I love vaccines”
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Are those iron lungs? Wow, brings back memories. My family en masse came down with TB in the early Sixties and wound up in a TB sanitarium. Of course by that my brother had wound up deaf due to a combination of scarlet fever and diptheria. There was some mix up about the vaccines.
I think part of the problem with the anti-vaccination people is that they really don’t remember a world that didn’t have vaccines. I am old enough that the only vaccinations I received were for smallpox, whooping cough and polio. I am immune to measles and rubella, only because I actually had them. One of my classmates had to spend a week in a darkened room because he had such a severe case of measles that the doctors were afraid his eyesight would be affected if he didn’t. I actually participated in Sabin Oral Sunday, which finally helped stop the spread of polio.
People simply don’t remember how devastating these childhood diseases were. The anti-vaccination movement can present a real danger to public health.
full disclosure: i am the mother of two children who have been vaccinated. Nevertheless, i think the jury is still out on the link between autism and vaccinations. something like 70% of children who develop autism also develop a chronic measles infection in the urinary tract following vaccination. the risk of adverse affects following vaccinations are small, and the benefits, at least for me, far outweigh those risks. But i’m not ready to jump on the backs of people who choose not to vaccinate.
it would be interesting to look at whether children who are not vaccinated ever develop autism. wouldn’t that really go a long way in convincing parents that autism isn’t the result of an allergic reaction to vaccinations? it always interests me that when people make the claim that autism is caused in some way by vaccines nobody says, ‘ah! but look! these children weren’t vaccinated and still developed autism.”
Promoting the idea that there’s these non-existence connections between vaccinations and autism and other ill health effects is vicious and cruel to parents whose children are suffering from the diseases that are claimed to be caused by vaccinations. I can’t imagine how much a parent with an autistic child would suffer from guilt if she actually believed this bullcrap, because after all, it was she who got the child vaccinated. All needless—they may not know what causes autism, but I’m going to bet that if they ever do find out, it’s probably going to be genetic and not something that parents could have known or prevented.
Unfairly blaming mothers for causing autism? Kind of seems a little familiar.
What is it about autism that makes it such a lightning conductor for destructive, tragic myths?
http://www.psychologymatters.org/facilitated.html
To answer your question, ariane:
“Other larger studies have found no relationship between MMR vaccine and autism. For example, researchers in the UK studied the records of 498 children with autism born between 1979 and 1998. They found:
* The percentage of children with autism who received MMR vaccine was the same as the percentage of unaffected children in the region who received MMR vaccine.
* There was no difference in the age of diagnosis of autism in vaccinated and unvaccinated children.
* The onset of “regressive” symptoms of autism did not occur within 2, 4, or 6 months of receiving the MMR vaccine.”
Courtesy of the CDC, bolding mine.
I work with kids with autism, and it amazes me how many very intelligent people still stick by the vaccine meme. I think I kind of understand it; if autism is caused by a vaccine, it’s something that happened to your otherwise typical child, something that can possibly be reversed (and the quacks who push the vaccine explanation are usually selling an unproven treatment while they’re at it). The more likely explanation, that autism is something that your child is and has always been, genetically, is a lot harder to take. I sympathize with that, but at the same time, I hate to see the kids I work with get subjected to uncomfortable and ultimately useless quack treatments.
The jury’s not still out. The research has been done, and is being ignored by people who want to keep the controversy alive.
The most likely explanation for higher autism rates is that diagnostic tools have gotten better, and parents are more on the lookout for symptoms.
it’s really cruel to keep this bullshit alive, cruel to parents of autistic children primarily.
And no, it would not be “interesting” to deprive children of life-saving medications to see if autism rates differ. To create the control group you think is needed (it’s not, because the research has been done), you would have to sacrifice the lives of thousands to easily preventable diseases. That’s not “interesting”. That’s sadistic.
“it would be interesting to look at whether children who are not vaccinated ever develop autism.”
Considering that mass vaccination programs were really only implemented in the 1950’s, and autism as a disorder was defined in the 1930’s, that’s pretty much a historical given.
Just wanted to say great analysis of the personal side of this nonsense. I’m a long-time reader of Orac and PalMD who both do a great job of debunking the pseudoscientific crap these losers spill out of their pores, but you’ve done a great job of capturing the panic mentality this has the potential to create in parents.
Ariane - I’m interested to know where you got this 70% statistic. I don’t work with viruses, so I may be wrong, but I fail to see how being injected with and INACTIVE virus can result in infection (and if this is possible, please tell me, I’m not looking for a fight, I just didn’t think it was possible.)
Ariana Ben Eli,
They did do such a study in Japan and lo and behold found autism rates increasing in children not receiving the MMR vaccine. I’m sure we can try study other vaccines, but at some point the ethical concerns of leaving children susceptible to potential dangerous diseases isn’t worth the effort. Especially since every scientific study keeps finding no link between vaccines and autism. Keep those goalposts moving, though.
Ariane, the study you propose would be highly, highly unethical. Think about it. You’d be giving placebo injections to kids who’s parents think they’re now protected against disease. There is simply no way to do a double blind randomly controlled trial on this question and not run into serious moral complications.
Epidemiological data is not as solid a method as RCTs, I know. However, it’s the best we ethically can do in this instance is go by that, and the evidence thus far is massively against any vaccines/autism causation. And I mean massively, there is simply no credible data backing up such an assertion and tons of good research that refutes it.
I think that the anti-vaccination movement is greedy, ill-informed and people in it could very well be sued since they’re creating mini Patient Zeros within the community.
In fact, I hope someone sues their greedy asses.
A huge part of being in a society is considering all of society and not just yourself- this is in conflict with most people who decide to breed IMHO.
Do Vaccines Cause Autism?
But as for this:
Whatever guilt the parent might feel, I suspect it’s less than the relief that would come from knowing - or at least believing - that they’d found the cause of their child’s condition.
ariane @3-
epidemiologist have looked at the rates of vaccinated and unvaccinated children developing autism. Guess what there is no significant difference. Here is a link to a news paper article comparing Japanese children before and after the MMR vaccine was available. A quick google search will bring up a lot more studies. Unfortunately, it is hard to find them with all of the antivaccine crowded spewing their same crap all over the web.
I agree with you, Amanda, but let me put in a quick plea for mercy before you condemn the autism-vaccine crowd too hard. Having an autistic child sucks like you wouldn’t believe. Most of a mother’s waking hours are nightmarish. If you’ll forgive the melodrama, it’s a punishment ended only by death. Apart from the challenges of living with and trying to educate the kid, consider how much blame mothers get whenever their kids are the least bit annoying, flawed, unusual, or expensive.
If it happened to you, you’d thrash desperately for an explanation. Genetics? That can’t be all of it, or we wouldn’t have seen this increase in diagnoses (which exceeds what you’d expect from increases in diagnostic intervention). Vaccine-blaming communities online and IRL give a parent support and encouragement …
… at least in the short term. If this scary ideology catches on, look forward not only to more infectious disease but mothers’ getting blamed for vaccinating their kids and blamed for not doing so.
There is certainly a strong whiff of crazy to the woo-based science of anti-vaccination ‘activists.’ But craziness isn’t just a personal problem. The anti-vac approach can definitely be understood as a misplaced response to the overmedicalization of everyone, especially children. When parents are bombarded with constant demands to participate in a system that often just chews them up and are shamed when something goes wrong with their kids, they’re going to turn against some part of the system. It just royally sucks that vaccinations is what they’re reacting against because it puts others at serious risk. It doubly sucks that the anti-vac people take advantage of the shaming in order to justify their craziness and further their support/funding. It triply sucks for the poor kids whose parents obsess about vaccines rather than organizing around educational equity.
Is it any coincidence that the last remaining pockets of widespread polio infection are in Pakistan and Nigeria, where Muslim clerics declare that it is an American plot to steal the fertility of their virgins? Woo-based medicine abounds when outside threats are perceived.
My sister has autism and hadn’t been vaccinated yet,
ariane ben eli. Whenever I bring that up, the people who believe that vaccines cause autism always have a bullshit answer ready to explain it away. It’s ridiculous. I vaccinated my children even with a family history on both sides (my sister and my nephew on my husband’s side) and I got a lot of flak for it.
Unree, I believe that it sucks. But I don’t see why believing lies about how this happened changes the suck one iota. It’s still gonna suck. I’m not sure why a lie is more comfort than the truth.
Giving people comforting lies is a terrible thing to do. The short term comfort is no trade-off for the long term importance of keeping your feet planted on the ground.
If it happened to you, you’d thrash desperately for an explanation.
I understand people thrashing around for an explanation. My friend’s mother joined a fundamentalist church after her other daughter died of meningitis and it’s hard for me to declare that she was stupid or weak for needing that support after her child’s horrible death.
However, when the explanation that people seize on is not only incorrect, but is likely to cause injury to others, I lose quite a bit of my sympathy towards someone trying to come up with an explanation. “The vaccine did it” is about as rational as “God did it,” but at least deciding that God did it won’t endanger the lives of the kids your child goes to school with.
I’m sitting right now next to a wonderful little girl who is autistic. I don’t know “why” and frankly, after knowing her for over 10 years now, I don’t care “why”.
She’s one of the best people I know and I adore her.
Oh, and a random comment to make it all about Me Me Me …
As someone who has dealt with various nasty intestinal symptoms (like Irritable Bowel Syndrome and lactose intolerance), color me completely unsurprised that some people have found that their autistic child is much less volatile when they change his/her diet. I can say from personal experience that gas pains and the like hurt WAY more than people seem to realize. If I was in constant digestive pain and unable to communicate, I’d probably be uncontrollable, too.
Jesus Bloody Christ hopped up on a popsicle stick! If this is you being described here, get thee some respite! Stat! Dead fucking serious.
Stressful? Oh yeah. Hard? You betcha. But the rest of this particular piece shows a mind that needs some rest/education/assistance getting head out of ass.
(Psst! Jay! Now you can “snark”…)
These assholes are also freeloading off those of us who did get immunized.
If you’re immunized against a disease, you probably won’t get it. Therefore, you won’t pass it on. So if most people are immunized in a given population, someone who blew off getting immunized is less likely to encounter someone with the guilty germs, and is thus less likely to get sick.
But they’re banking on most other people doing the right thing. Given their beliefs that immunizations are bad for you, their attitude is basically “screw everyone else, they can get sick and run the risks I believe exist–as long as my downy little ass is untouched.”
I was on the fence about all this until my recent trip to India.
I opened the paper one morning and saw the headline “First Polio Cases of 2008 Appear Near Hyderabad”. Including photos. Modern day photos in full color. It wasn’t even front page news, and it was phrased ‘first outbreak of the year’ (this was January, btw), not Holy Crap Can You Believe Somebody Got Polio?!
All my children will be getting vaccinated. Hopefully in moderation and in an informed manner, but yes, they will be getting vaccinated.
I can’t imagine how much a parent with an autistic child would suffer from guilt if she actually believed this bullcrap, because after all, it was she who got the child vaccinated. All needless—they may not know what causes autism, but I’m going to bet that if they ever do find out, it’s probably going to be genetic and not something that parents could have known or prevented.
Two thoughts: Yes, you can’t imagine any part of parenting and this is no exception. While I’m supportive of your decision not to reproduce, and think more people should follow your logic to that end rather than stopping short and having one or two to please the grandparents, this remark may be the best illustration I can posit that you’re not cut out for the job.
More importantly, some children appear to be vulnerable to grouped vaccinations. That is, some children’s bodies DON’T respond as expected to the assault on the immune system that the standard vaccine schedule represents, and get very sick. Some children die.
How do I know this? Well, I was lucky that my child only had a reaction that caused days of high fever followed by four years of regressed and retarded development.
Most kids who get as sick as she did just die. Weren’t we lucky?
Herd immunity has a price.
As you have no intention of paying that price, my suggestion would be that you vent your hostility on a more worthy target than parents who question the vaccination-industrial complex in search of a humane and respectful public policy that meets health goals–which is not currently what we have.
Two points:
1) You’re conflating time periods and regions with dramatically different public health and medical infrastructures. Not only are people in industralized nations less likely to get certain diseases, but we’re less likely to die from it if they do. Pre-existing disease burden and immunosuppression are what lead to infectious diseases’ astronomical mortality and morbidity rates in developing nations generally, and African nations in specific. Antibiotics may treat pertussis, but they don’t treat measles — yet measles kills only 1 in 1,000 Americans who get the disease, while it kills around 100 in 1,000 in Africa.
2) You’re right about the thalidomide-only theory. But you’re mistaking arguments over causation for arguments over what the debate is really about. The debate’s not really about autism; it’s about the precautionary principle and corporate responsibility.
Problem is, enough people are now buying into the anti-immunization propaganda that herd immunity is breaking down. Here in California, you can refuse immunization for any old reason you please and, lo and behold, they’re having measles outbreaks in San Diego.
But, hey, I’m sure that while his parents sat in the emergency room with their son with a 104-degree temperature, they thought, “Oh, thank God he’ll only have brain damage from a high fever and not from autism!” And they were probably doubly glad to be vaccine refusers when their other two kids came down with measles, too.
What truly annoys me about the antivaxers is the amount of time and money they waste that could be better allocated to figuring out how autism is acquired and, more importantly, how those with autism and related disorders can lead happy and productive lives. Because they can and they do.
Gargh. Sleepless nights due to finals suck.
1) You’re conflating time periods and regions with dramatically different public health and medical infrastructures. Not only are people in industralized nations less likely to get certain diseases, but we’re less likely to die from it if they do. Pre-existing disease burden and immunosuppression are what lead to infectious diseases’ astronomical mortality and morbidity rates in developing nations generally, and African nations in specific. Antibiotics may treat pertussis, but they don’t treat measles — yet measles kills only 1 in 1,000 Americans who get the disease, while it kills around 100 in 1,000 in Africa.
2) You’re right about the thimerosol-only theory. But you’re mistaking arguments over causation for arguments over what the debate is really about. The debate’s not really about autism; it’s about the precautionary principle and corporate responsibility.
People who don’t vaccinate in this country are free-riding on everyone who does. Their kids are unlikely to contract these diseases because the incidence in the general population is so low. When I was in the Peace Corps in Paraguay, most families I knew had lost at least one child to one of the diseases known here only by their vaccines. It’s this exact same attitude in other countries that prevents the eradication of polio.
But if you are the parent of a young child, I understand a certain sqeamishness about the sheer number of vaccines that are given now, including for diseases that are very rarely fatal, to very young children, usually four shots at time, some shots with multiple vaccines in them, starting at two months. My son is two and he’s been vaccinated for at least a dozen diseases. As I mentioned in the other thread, I delayed the Hep B for him and would consider not vaccinating future children for chicken pox. And as PhoenixRising wrote, herd immunity does come with a price. But I would never not get the MMR or the DPT.
1) There is no thimerisol (the mercury type stabilizer) in vaccines any more and autism rates still go up. Perhaps pollution might be a direction for autism research? Nah, let’s just blame the vaccines.
2) “Herd immunity has a price” as do all social goods. I’m not sure berating Amanda for not paying that price as you say, disallows her from analysis. To suggest she is “not cut out for the job” of parenting, when she has respectfully admitted she cannot imagine some of those struggles, is just venting your hostility on her.
I’ve always assumed that a big part of the reason they load up on vaccines is the (unspoken) assumption that you never know when the parent(s) will lose their health insurance or switch to a different plan, so they’d better get the vaccines in while the kid still has coverage.
If we didn’t have a for-profit healthcare system, vaccines could be given on a more rational schedule and not front-loaded to try and get them in before the parent has to pay out of pocket.
Given that 70 children had to be quarantined in San Diego because one unvaccinated kid managed to spread his disease to 11 others, I would need to know that my kid in particular reacts badly to vaccines in order to not vaccinate them.
Speaking as someone who got chicken pox during their Junior Prom and then gave it to their late-40s mother (and chicken pox is DANGEROUS when you’re out of childhood), I had no problem immunizing my children against chicken pox.
PhoenixRising, lots of us have children. Would you mind not implying that we’re unfit parents if we agree with Amanda?
Right, Todd.
Early intervention, a myriad of therapies (speech, applied behavioral, occupational, physical and more) over the past 7 years, and alot of hard work/patience by Jean and all of us who love/care for her have transformed our 10 year old daughter from a feral, uncommunicative person who howled and grunted into a happy, silly and caring child who can talk a blue streak, is learning to read and do math, and last week, came in 2nd in her Special Olympics event against 3 classmates/boys. She is also now learning to swim and conquer her fear of dogs and motorcycles/loud noises.
She also knows that she is autistic (she and I spoke last summer at length when she asked why she was “different” than her sister and other kids) and that while it makes many things she wants to learn to do more difficult sometimes, that with her own determination, effort and sometimes guidance or assistance, she can accomplish alot.
Our kid rocks!
If anyone’s interested–the MMR vaccine isn’t a “killed” vaccine–it’s made from live (attenuated) strains. The most common side effects are transient, mild symptoms of measles and rubella. Most vaccines aren’t inactivated. Polio is, of course. If you do see a serious side effect in a vaccine, live or otherwise, it’s usually anaphylaxis and that’s most likely not a response to the actual viral components, but to something in the vaccine solution formulation.
“Big Pharma does a lot of wrong things, but mainly because they charge too much for products that are actually good.”
There is a sad but undeniable element of truth to that. However, I also don’t think people appreciate the magnitude not only of the research costs, but of some of the processing chemicals required to make some drug products, specially monoclonal antibody vaccines, and the cost of regulatory compliance. Not complaining about the last, mind you–can anybody say “Thalidomide?”–but it’s an expense that most other industries do not have to bear to the same degree. AND to give Pharma some credit, they do manufacture and distribute at a loss sometimes for humanitarian reasons–one good example is Merck and river blindness: http://pubs.acs.org/cen/coverstory/83/8325/8325ivermectin.html
f anyone’s interested–the MMR vaccine isn’t a “killed” vaccine–it’s made from live (attenuated) strains. The most common side effects are transient, mild symptoms of measles and rubella. Most vaccines aren’t inactivated. Polio is, of course. If you do see a serious side effect in a vaccine, live or otherwise, it’s usually anaphylaxis and that’s most likely not a response to the actual viral components, but to something in the vaccine solution formulation.
“Big Pharma does a lot of wrong things, but mainly because they charge too much for products that are actually good.”
There is a sad but undeniable element of truth to that. However, I also don’t think people appreciate the magnitude not only of the research costs, but of some of the processing chemicals required to make some drug products, specially monoclonal antibody vaccines, and the cost of regulatory compliance. Not complaining about the last, mind you–can anybody say “Thalidomide?”–but it’s an expense that most other industries do not have to bear to the same degree. AND to give Pharma some credit, they do manufacture and distribute at a loss sometimes for humanitarian reasons–one good example is Merck and river blindness: http://pubs.acs.org/cen/coverstory/83/8325/8325ivermectin.html
There will always be outliers with any medical procedure. If you look at the early polio vaccines, there were a lot of kids with bad reactions. But, most adults took the risk as the polio was worse. Duh.
Here in Whitesylvania there are pockets of non-immunized populations. We find them as they contract diseases for which there were ‘cures’. Stoopid Mammy and Pappy had the vaccines but the unlucky kids did not. So this poor child is in agony because their parents want to be contrarily stoopid.
Calling people stupid isn’t analysis, it’s venting hostility.
That wasn’t berating, it was praise. Many people who have no instinct for what it might feel like to have kids solve that by having kids, instead of realizing in a timely fashion that they don’t want to know what lifelong responsibility for a fragile and vulnerable person would feel like.
The idiots who don’t want vaccines are certainly endangering us all.
The know-it-alls who think that our current system for providing vaccines has no price and therefore doesn’t bear scrutiny are contributing to the problem, not addressing it.
But they’re banking on most other people doing the right thing. Given their beliefs that immunizations are bad for you, their attitude is basically “screw everyone else, they can get sick and run the risks I believe exist–as long as my downy little ass is untouched.”
You are, in fact, describing Homo Economus, Rational (Wo)Man as the prevailing ideology makes her/him out to be.
The vaccination issue shows just how much the systems based on this ideological structure depend on exploiting people being better than the ideology makes them out to be.
… then they’d be ‘alternative’ medical providers.
Seriously. The solution to Big Pharma is socialized medicine, not actual medicine for the rich and fake medicine for those who can’t afford it.
PhoenixRising, lots of us have children. Would you mind not implying that we’re unfit parents if we agree with Amanda?
Sorry it came across that way. I don’t think you’re unfit, I think if you take that kind of attitude, language and thinking to, say, your kids’ school and inflict it on other parents–you’re making a serious problem worse.
Talking down to people because you disagree with their actions is a fond tradition among progressives, and in this case it’s exacerbating a potential crisis in public health.
That endangers my child’s future health, which is something I feel strongly about maximizing.
My mother sent me over to play with the neighbor kid when she got the chicken pox in about 1974. I never caught it. Until I was 21 and in college and woke up burning next to my seriously freaked out GF. I had to go home to my parents’ house and be quarantined for 10 days and fell seriously behind. Plus, it hurt like a motherfucker. Thank “god” my folks were abroad and I could drink all their liquor.
Mrs. F is currently in her second trimester and we intend to get all the dang vaccinations. I used to live in West Africa and I saw what those diseases did to families.
Chingona,
my 5 year old came down with chicken pox when I was 9 mo pregnant. I had never had it.
It was hard on all of us:
me because I was afraid of getting it and passing it to a newborn, and because I couldn’t comfort her.
her because she needed mom and couldn’t have her.
It was a long 2 days before the results came back saying I was immune.
When the vaccine became available. the kids got it.
Just as when HPV vaccine became available, my oldest got it. (the baby will get in a couple years, around 10-11)
That way she’ll likely never have to take the call I took today: “you’re still squamous. Check back in 6mo.”
So what’s your solution? Since pointing out the many studies that show that autism and vaccines are not linked counts as “talking down” to people, and pointing out that they’re endangering other people’s kids is “talking down” to people, what means are we supposed to use?
I have a feeling that those kids in San Diego who were not vaccinated against measles and had to be quarantined were not all kids who had bad reactions to previous vaccines. So short of having a health scare that almost kills their children, how do we get through to people who have irrational reasons for not vaccinating?
Note: having a child who had a previous bad reaction to a vaccine is not an irrational reason for not vaccinating. We’re talking about the people who are so fearful that their child might be one of the one in 5,000 who has a bad reaction that they refuse all vaccines just in case.
“I used to live in West Africa and I saw what those diseases did to families.”
…which is probably what it will take here before (some) people realize how important vaccines are.
Having many Mormon relatives, with their emphasis on genealogy, I’ve seen way too many examples from my own family tree where (for example) 8 children were born but 4 lived to adulthood, etc. And it was usually disease that got them…
Phoenix, you may have missed the deadline, but you can file for compensation since your child had a vaccine injury:
http://www.hrsa.gov/vaccinecompensation/
You only have three years after the initial injury to file, though.
Thanks, Amanda. It’s hard to argue with parents who have to cope with an autistic child. As someone with an autistic brother, I can sympathize. But this really is a public health issue, and I wish the anti-vaccine people would grow a sense of responsibility.
Mnem, my successes in talking to anti-vax whack jobs and convincing them to change their ill-informed ways have been limited, so maybe I don’t have the right approach either.
It has sometimes been productive to point out to them that in fact, they are permitted to demand one vaccine at a time with waiting periods. This allows their children to recover from each assault and will help to isolate the cause should there be a reaction.
Of course I’d appreciate some of the effort that pro-science progressives like to put into slurring the ignorant, privileged parents who refuse to vaccinate being re-directed into pushing for insurance coverage on vaccines that pays per shot, not per visit, but I have other primary issues that I’m working on.
Maybe you’d like to pick that one up, since you seem to grasp the connection between for-profit insurance and vaccines presenting an unnecessarily increased hazard to some children’s health.
I’m pretty sure that ‘You’re an over-entitled, scientifically ignorant ingrate who would change your ways if you’d seen a kid with tetanus die right in front of you, like I did’ was my all-time least effective comment in response to the statement ‘We’re not vaccinating’, though. So that’s been tested and, scientifically, it has failed to produce the desired change in behavior.
I think that an unspoken part of PhoenixRising’s complaint is that the parents of kids who are outliers with respect to vaccinations — and the kids themselves — get a completely raw deal. When they complain they’re considered whiners, and under the current medicolegal system they have to bear all the costs of being outliers by themselves. Instead, they should get lifetime care and an effing medal awarded in a public ceremony by the surgeon general, because they’re casualties in a war.
The people who flat-out refuse vaccines, on the other hand? They’re deserters. They’re counting on my kids and the kids of everyone around them to take the risks of vaccination so they can get the benefits.
(And yeah, it probably would be better for kids to get vaccinations at better-spaced intervals, although there would still be some bad reactions. In my neck of the woods, the extra cost of two or three more doctor’s visits a year for the first two or three years of life would cost some families enough money to make food scarce for a couple months.
My perspective on the autism-vaccine thingy is a bit different than many other people’s for a pair of reasons. Firstly, I have autism (if any of you have also read the earlier thread about childhood self-endangerment, my comment (#13 on the thread for those who would rather not follow a link) describes a pair of incidents of classic autistic behavior). Yes, I’m high-functioning. I can talk, care for myself, hold down a job, and get a college degree. Nonetheless, I am autistic. Meet me in the real world and speak with me, and you’ll notice that I’m different. I am highly socially awkward. I can’t read body language or facial expressions. I am very skilled in some areas and absurdly unskilled in others.
Secondly, autism (high-functioning, mostly) is rampant in my family. Of the six descendants of one pair of my great-grandparents, four (yes, four) have an autism-spectrum disorder of some variety - an incidence of 67%. When we look back at people before that, we see anecdotal evidence of autism frequently. I tell people who believe that vaccines cause autism this and they tell me that I’m lying. This is impossible, they tell me. Many anti-vaxxers - and their cousins in woo, the people who think that autism can be cured by chelation therapy - firmly believe that autism is a horrible disease with no positives and that all autistics and their families are damned to a horrible existence without hope. Quite frankly, this is offensive. I do have problems. I will not attempt to deny them. Yet I have a life, I am content with my lot in life, I have accomplishments, and I do not need to be “cured,” thank you very much. Also, what Todd (#26) said.
My opinion on the autism-vaccine theory in short: bogus.
Long answer: vaccines do not cause autism. Autism is a genetic disorder affecting the formation of synapses in the brain (for the non-neuroscientists: synapses are the connections between nerve cells; the more synapses you have in your brain, the more interconnected the various parts of your brain are). Autistic brains seem to have too many synapses in specific areas, leading to information overload. End result: loss of regulation of brain pathways (and thus improper functioning of their related behaviors and/or bodily functions), over-regulation of other pathways, and the inability to process certain types of information. Many autistics have abnormal blood levels of hormones (most notably elevated levels of the neurotransmitter serotonin, which is heavily implicated in mental illnesses such as major depression and the effects of psychotropic drugs such as ecstasy and LSD).
I sympathize with the parents of autistic children, especially children who are highly hyperactive, unmanageable and socially incompetent. Yet I firmly believe that the problem is not the vaccines. Vaccines are good things. Yes, there are some people who are injured by vaccines. This occurs rarely, however. Very rarely. Vanishingly rarely.
My theory on the reason for the rising rates of autism: it isn’t happening. Rather, society has changed, medicine has changed, and people’s perceptions of things have changed.
Firstly, 50 years ago, many children now diagnosed as autistic would have been diagnosed as mentally retarded. Due to better diagnostic analyses, these children are now being given a proper diagnosis. The diagnosis of “mentally retarded” is about as firm and precise as saying that everyone in a hospital is “sick.” Yes, it is true, but it also misses the point. That’s reason #1 for rising diagnoses.
Secondly, a century ago, a person like me (a high-functioning autistic) would have been described as “odd” (probably rebellious and/or hysterical too, as I’m a woman). I most likely would not have been seriously evaluated by a psychiatric professional. If I had ever met such a person, they probably would have said that I was “unfeminine” or some similar nonsense. The very idea that I might be autistic would never have been considered. The definition of autism has broadened. Today, people who 20 years ago would not have been considered autistic are. That’s reason #2 for rising diagnoses.
Thirdly, society itself has changed. A century ago, a person who was socially incompetent (even totally nonverbal) but who was nonetheless physically healthy could work on the family farm or do menial labor and thus be productive. These days, there are fewer jobs that both provide wages sufficient to live on and can be done by a person with mental handicaps. Also, the attitude of society towards such people has changed. In those days, families made efforts to hide them away (especially if they were middle- to upper-class) or minimize the perception of their disability. This was true of people with all sorts of disabilities, not just autistic people. These days, the social acceptability of hiding the physically or mentally handicapped child away from company is decreasing. It is not gone, but it is much, much less than it was. Many families have swung completely in the opposite direction. They are open and vocal about their family member and demand attention and support. Thus, society’s perception of the incidence of autism has tended upward. Reason #3.
Finally, consider how much health in general has changed. Many people with autism-spectrum disorders have physical ailments as well. In previous times, they may have died or have been invalids. Now, they survive and may be effectively treated for their physical ailment. Even if the absolute number of people born with autism remains constant, the number of living, non-invalid autistics is larger. Just as there are more living, non-invalid people alive today who were born with spina bifida, harelips, deformed limbs, hydrocephaly, and cerebral palsy than there used to be. Such conditions are now either no longer automatic death sentences or were never death sentences but are now more treatable, allowing those born with them to live more normal lives. So, in a sense, I am contradicting what I said previously - there are more autistic people today. But this increase does not even begin to account for the larger diagnosed number that exist today. So call this reason #4, with a caveat.
This obscenely long-winded rant brought to you by Esteleth, a high-functioning autistic who thinks that society, not her, is what needs healing.
Mnem, we’re 7 years out and have already been through the whole process, which in our case included the best and most unlikely outcome: My kid ‘grew out of’ all her symptoms, and we got fired from all the special ed stuff, about 3 months after she began to speak.
Which was a randomly timed event almost exactly 4 years after the reaction.
So now she’s perfectly normal; a healthy, active state champion athlete and all-around typical mix of (endless source of joy) plus (intermittent pain in the butt).
Thanks, though. We don’t need help that way, but we’d like for our experiences to inform and motivate other parents to carefully examine the timing of vaccines.
Darn, I must be in moderation.
You and me both, Lisa KS.
Here I went and wrote a damned essay (1044 words long, according to Word) and it’s not up yet.
However, don’t think that I’m bashing Amanda or the mods at all. I’m sure they’re having to wade through a bunch of nonsense in the queue.
Gargh spam filters. My apologize if it turns out to be a double-post.
1) Infectious diseases in industralized nations aren’t nearly as dangerous in industralized nations as they are in developing ones. Measles mortality is less than 1 in 1,000 in America while it’s 100 per 1,000 in half of Africa. Similarly, America’s history with these infectious diseases has little relevance for the present due to the dramatic changes in public health infrastructure (i.e., sanitation and urban design). Most of measles/pertussis/etc.’s morbidity and mortality rates are due to pre-existing disease burdens and immunosuppression, not access to medical care for the specific infectious disease.
2) If the vaccination debate is about autism, then why were eerily identical arguments used in Jacobsen v. Massachusetts?
Vaccination is as much about autism as abortion is about the fetus’s right to life. That is to say, not at all. It’s about the precautionary principle, corporate responsibility, and the right of the government to potentially harm an individual for the public welfare.
PhoenixRising,
I have a question about your personal experience. Did the doctors give you any indication as to what your daughter’s reaction was related to? Each vaccination does have an associated risk, so perhaps it wasn’t the grouping but perhaps one particular vaccine within the group that caused your daughter’s reaction.
Well.
Speaking as a parent of an ASD kid - and one who’s recently diagnosed, so I’m still a little shell-shocked from all of it - even if you told me it would up his chances of ASD, he’d still have gotten all of the vaccines.
My grandfather had polio, didn’t walk until he was three, and had issues his whole life stemming from it. I thought as a child that polio had been ‘eradicated’ and didn’t understand until I was an adult that that wasn’t so.
I don’t really believe that ASD has any link to vaccines, but even if I did, we know for sure that vaccines are linked to kids not getting measles and polio.
Fair enough, Louise. I overstated. I am too close to one particular situation. The more neutral version: Many (not all) distressed people find comfort in a mechanistic causality. Because there was the antecedent, now there is the consequence. Because there is the consequence, there must have been an antecedent.
When I said that for affected families the vaccine story might feel better (less bleak, more invigorating) than no story, which is what mainstream doctors and epidemiologists give them, I did not mean to speak for everyone coping with autism. And I should not have focused so single-mindedly on the pain of having a child with this condition. I didn’t mean to say it’s pure agony. I know that’s not true.
I agree with Louise and the “autism hell is only aleviated by death” statement. That is about the most ablist statement I’ve heard in a long time and is probably why parents who are out killing their disabled kids are getting off so easily by the courts. Really, get some help.
As far as vaccinations go, I have vaccinated both of my children, but I am a slow vaccinator. We do one at a time. My son was rushed to the ER by ambulance 2x because of the MMR virus and hep B virus caused seizures. Seizures that are rare, but can cause brain damage. I do believe that in most cases, the benefits outweigh the risks, but I also have some sympathy for the fear that people have of vaccinating their kids.
I think part of the problem is distrust of Big Pharma and a lack of full disclosure and a general trend of misinformation. I mean, even if Thimerisol does not cause autism, WHY IN THE HELL are we putting unecessary mercury in our infant’s vaccines? It defies logic. I do think it is unwise for kids not to be vaccinated in most cases, but it seems like karma to me. If this is what it takes to get pharmaceutical companies to shape up, then so be it. I think these checks and balances are not necessarily always a bad thing.
Ha! I got a tetanus shot last week too! It was the classic “step on a rusty nail” thing.
Amanda, I don’t know if this is what you got, but when I went in, they gave me a vaccination not only for tetanus, but they lumped in with a vaccination for whooping cough — because it’s making a comeback now that people aren’t vaccinating their kids so they’re trying to build up herd immunity again.
Anyhow, I wasn’t an anti-vaccination nut, but I considered myself to be vaccination-agnostic (which wasn’t really a big deal since I don’t have kids) for a long time. I think that vaccinations are by and large a good thing, but I found a lot of the stuff that happened in late 2001 to be extremely suspicious, particularly adding the “thou shalt not sue vaccination manufacturers” part of the Patriot Act–right when a lot of questions were being raised about the amount of mercury in the combined MMR–It just seemed a very suspicious thing to do and so it was easy to think that they were trying to hide something serious.
Amanda, I’d urge you to be very careful about your certainty level here, particularly given your lack of formal scientific training. I know you like and understand much science, but you are over the abject belief line here IMHO.
Good science has a good bit of uncertainty about it. It is very foolish to impute that certainty apriori because all scientific evaluations have blind spots, make value judgements about inclusion, restrict the situation to make it more studyable, etc.
The links between big pharma and the CDC are extremely problematic, and most of the best scientists have long left the CDC anyway. You cannot assert that the same organization that has been infiltrated with Dr. Kerouac Types and gutted by Bushco partisans and their pogroms is somehow putting out good information in other areas. After all, they totally fucked up with this year’s flu vaccine, in part because they lost most of the best people.
What this adds up to is a distrust of the entire system.
As for autism and vaccinations, there is solid research that the timing is coincidental. If it wasn’t MMR, it would be whatever is recommended at the time. There may yet be a link shown, but I’d be totally surprised because I have seen research and seen presentations of clinical studies demonstrating that the brain changes start very much earlier than that - like, possibly before birth. Autistic children typically start out with a somewhat smaller than average head circumference, and then grow excessive amounts of white matter during their first year such that their brain and head become very much larger than average.
There is also strong indications from panel and cohort studies that autism is an epigenetic phenomenon anyway, and likely one borne of an exposure in utero that wasn’t present or was far less pervasive in earlier times, so blaming the parents for poor breeding choices doesn’t cut it. (My brother is Aspy, so this is a personal issue here).
Oh, yeah, my mother had mumps when she was 40 and it was absolutely brutal! I stayed home from school to care for her, took her to the doctor on my own (my learners permit didn’t say anything about that over-21 person in the passenger seat being alert), and so on for two weeks.
Long story short: IF YOU ARE AN ADULT WHO HASN’T BEEN VACCINATED, HASN’T HAD YOUR MMR BOOSTER, ETC. GO DO IT!
Seriously - as an adult, mumps can make you sterile, chickenpox can make you blind, and mumps, measles, and chickenpox are all extremely nasty to you.
Each vaccination does have an associated risk, so perhaps it wasn’t the grouping but perhaps one particular vaccine within the group that caused your daughter’s reaction.
Umm, yeah. We’ll never know which one, if it was one, because they were combined on the catch-up schedule.
Point being, if it was one item we can’t isolate which one, and if it was the combination the whole megillah was avoidable.
Which is why less is more, and lots of parents and some pediatricians advocate spacing.
Kate’s point, which is that autism is both no joking matter and most likely epigenetic, is a good one.
My son has Aspergers and when we look back, we recognize that some of his behaviors even in infancy were unusual. Aspergers isn’t as abrupt in its appearance and tends to occur later in childhood, so we generally tend to look back and see the little quirks he had as a toddler in a different light. His single minded focus over a toy was kind of cute when he was little, but it should have been a dead give away.
Haven’t read all the comments yet, but I’m about to.
My problem with vaccines as they currently stand is it’s too many too soon, or the disease in question is ridiculously benign. No 3 month old is going to contract tetanus, for example. And chicken pox and the flu (for immuno-normal children) are not a big deal whatsoever. From what I understand, measles is pretty much the same level of lethality as chicken pox, but I’d have to do more research (like, when it gets important) before I decide that.
I remember when I was a kid chicken pox was considered no big deal. Now that there’s a vaccine, chicken pox can kill you? I’m 24, so unless the pox randomly mutated into some super deadly virus, the scare about it is utterly ridiculous.
Personally, I plan to selectively vax on a later schedule. My kids will not get the flu or chicken pox vax, possibly not the MMR (again, further research) and all others won’t start until they’re at least 3 and their bodies can handle it a lot better.
And I hate knee jerk reactions on either side of the issues. “Vaccines will kill you!” is just as bad as “Give your kid 14 shots in their first year or they’ll kill all the kids in the neighborhood!!!” in my not so humble opinion.
I doubt many posting here would ever accept the label “promiscuous” on their medical records because they had a prescription for birth control and were not married.
The same sort of “all people who dare to question the official party line on vaccines are dangerous wackos” led to me insisting that “vaccine resister” be removed from my children’s records because I dared … I DARED QUESTION the schedule piling on vaccines together so extremely and drew up my own that still included all the shots, but on a schedule that made more sense. They still got the really important ones (like the infant pneumonia one) right away, I just held off on the HepB and spaced out the others.
Of course questions about vaccination that go beyond “will it make my baby cry?” are not allowed in this extreme frame that is being echoed by this post.
Okay, yes, so I was a little worried about the kid of someone I’ve never met.
Very glad to hear it all ended up working out.
When/if we have kids, we will probably want to do a spread-out vaccine schedule if we possibly can. You’d think that common sense would say that piling vaccines on top of each other would be more likely to cause adverse reactions, but when have insurance companies ever acted out of common sense? Most people in my age group have done or are planning to do it this way if they have the financial means.
Not even close. Measles is very lethal. The World Health Organization was triumphant that they cut measles deaths to a mere 345,000 worldwide in 2005 through their vaccination campaign.
Measles is a very serious, very deadly disease. The fact that it came close to being eliminated in this country is lulling you into a false sense of security.
I’m ancient enough to remember a kid in my neighborhood who was a polio survivor (it was the early 60s). He wore a brace on one leg. My uncle survived polio in the 1930s (he was an immigrant from Albania where vaccines were generally unavailable), and was crippled for life.
My daughter has had every vaccination recommended by her pediatrician, from the Hep-B vaccine when she was barely months old to the HPV last year (she’s 13). My younger brother was one of the first kids to receive the MMR vaccine. Myself, I suffered through measles, mumps, chickenpox and rubella as a kid (the “old fashioned way” to gain immunity!) We did have DPT, polio and smallpox vaccinations in school - I remember lining up for the shots. The last year I got a polio vaccine was the first year of the oral vaccine - a red dot on a sugar cube.
We wiped out smallpox and were on track to wipe out polio, but now we have idiots trying to stop it. The Waldorf school that got closed for whooping cough is right up the highway from me *shudder*. There’s no way in hell I’m not going to immunize my daughter.
From what I understand as well, some of the recent outbreaks have not come from people not vaccinating - they resulted from poor vaccine storage and tracking in some isolated rural areas.
There is also the consideration of booster shots for those of us who had the early MMR (1968 to 1978 or so). This led to middle school out breaks for years until they figured out the problem of insufficient vaccination. If you have not had a booster and you are 30 to 40 years old, you might consider getting one.
Ashley: I wouldn’t call measles “benign”, the complications can be crippling and even deadly. Rubella may be mild, but it poses extreme risks for the fetus of a pregnant women who contracts it, with horrifying birth defects the usual result. Your kid with a “mild” case of rubella can destroy the life of a child and his or her family by just being in the same room with them - even before the symptoms appear.
I still have a chickenpox scar on my face, 45 years later. (Since I could grow them I’ve always worn long sideburns to cover it.) I would prefer that I wasn’t scarred.
As I said above, our daughter had the vaccine schedule recommended by her pediatrician, and has suffered no ill (though I can’t say it’s the same as what you were recommended.)
Just a note from my understanding the chicken pox vaccine is given to prevent people developing shingles later in life. Because chicken pox is a virus (varicella-zoster) it stays in your system for life and if you become immuno-compromised later in life you can develop other diseases associated with the virus.
As I say whenever I get into the vaccine debate, I only know the vaccination history of 4 people. All 4 were given their vaxes on the schedule that was around in the 80s and 90s.
I had no reactions, no VPD (vaccine preventable diseases)
My half-sister had no reactions, but still contracted chicken pox.
My husband had several grand mal seizures when he was 2, and had measles AND whooping cough.
My stepsister had no VPDs, but had periodic seizures between the ages of 2 and 8.
Again, the plural of anecdote is not data, but I know too many people who’ve had adverse reactions to think that vaccines are totally benign. A good idea, yes, but just as I’m not going to follow doctor recommendations and rub a potential allergen in my kid’s eyes the moment they exit the vagina (they give erythromycin in the off chance that the mother has some disease which is regularly tested for. My husband’s allergic to that drug, I’m allergic to most antibiotics), I”m not going to shoot my kid up with 8 vaccines before they’re 6 months old.
Just a note from my understanding the chicken pox vaccine is given to prevent people developing shingles later in life.
That is theoretical and theoretically possible, but not demonstrated even in the Japanese populations that had the varicella vaccine available many years before it was out in the US.
As I say whenever I get into the vaccine debate, I only know the vaccination history of 4 people. All 4 were given their vaxes on the schedule that was around in the 80s and 90s.
I had no reactions, no VPD (vaccine preventable diseases)
My half-sister had no reactions, but still contracted chicken pox.
My husband had several grand mal seizures when he was 2, and had measles AND whooping cough.
My stepsister had no VPDs, but had periodic seizures between the ages of 2 and 8.
Again, the plural of anecdote is not data, but I know too many people who’ve had adverse reactions to think that vaccines are totally benign. A good idea, yes, but just as I’m not going to follow doctor recommendations and rub a potential allergen in my kid’s eyes the moment they exit the vagina (they give erythromycin in the off chance that the mother has some disease which is regularly tested for. My husband’s allergic to that drug, I’m allergic to most antibiotics), I”m not going to shoot my kid up with 8 vaccines before they’re 6 months old.
You’d think that common sense would say that piling vaccines on top of each other would be more likely to cause adverse reactions, but when have insurance companies ever acted out of common sense?
It’s common sense to the bottom line that if you save three needles, syringes and office visits, you take home more money. For-profit medicine in a nutshell. Beyond that, it’s the typical Republican socialze-the-costs approach: All the treatment that my kid got after the life-threatening reaction itself was…you guessed it…early intervention. Which is a federally funded program.
So as much as I’m grateful that those services were available for my kid, it’s outrageous that our private insurance got to shift the costs onto the taxpayer after denying that their mandatory vaccine schedule, which we didn’t know to resist because anti-vax cranks are unscientific selfish jerks, had anything to do with the injury.
I’m such a vaccination crank that I do what my sister the midwife refers to as ‘the citizen’s arrest’: On Saturday night, there was a young mom in the bookstore with her 3 week old baby, in the children’s section. I complimented the cuteness, then quietly, but not at all subtly, told her that nearly every death of an infant under 3 months in our county is caused by whooping cough getting on a baby who is too little to have had her shots. And that there are some crazy people I know from my kid’s school whose kids are carriers because they’ve never had shots.
She was out of there so fast the pink lace head-garter flapped in her breeze.
As I say whenever I get into the vaccine debate, I only know the vaccination history of 4 people. All 4 were given their vaxes on the schedule that was around in the 80s and 90s.
I had no reactions, no VPD (vaccine preventable diseases)
My half-sister had no reactions, but still contracted chicken pox.
My husband had several grand mal seizures when he was 2, and had measles AND whooping cough.
My stepsister had no VPDs, but had periodic seizures between the ages of 2 and 8.
Again, the plural of anecdote is not data, but I know too many people who’ve had adverse reactions to think that vaccines are totally benign. A good idea, yes, but just as I’m not going to follow doctor recommendations and rub a potential allergen in my kid’s eyes the moment they exit the vagina (they give erythromycin in the off chance that the mother has some disease which is regularly tested for. My husband’s allergic to that drug, I’m allergic to most antibiotics), I”m not going to shoot my kid up with 8 vaccines before they’re 6 months old.
Ms. Kate is partially right about the CDC. Their recommendation for the HPV vaccine up to age 26 is mostly just giving money to Merck. The stats (average # of partners at that age, etc) don’t bear out the recommendation, but hey, what the hell? However, the fact that thimerisol is not longer in the vaccines does make the autism issue more clear.
Bah, I’m caught in moderation. Here’s a second try, sorry if this pops up more than once:
As I say whenever I get into the vaccine debate, I only know the vaccination history of 4 people. All 4 were given their vaxes on the schedule that was around in the 80s and 90s.
I had no reactions, no VPD (vaccine preventable diseases)
My half-sister had no reactions, but still contracted chicken pox.
My husband had several grand mal seizures when he was 2, and had measles AND whooping cough.
My stepsister had no VPDs, but had periodic seizures between the ages of 2 and 8.
Again, the plural of anecdote is not data, but I know too many people who’ve had adverse reactions to think that vaccines are totally benign. A good idea, yes, but just as I’m not going to follow doctor recommendations and rub a potential allergen in my kid’s eyes the moment they exit the vagina (they give erythromycin in the off chance that the mother has some disease which is regularly tested for. My husband’s allergic to that drug, I’m allergic to most antibiotics), I”m not going to shoot my kid up with 8 vaccines before they’re 6 months old.
Todd,
we generally tend to look back and see the little quirks he had as a toddler in a different light. His single minded focus over a toy was kind of cute when he was little, but it should have been a dead give away.
My kid is eight. I’m guessing yours is younger.
We refer to these oddities as ‘her unique strengths’. For example, she was 7 when she won the 8-and-under category in her sport at the state level. Which is so weird we were asked to prove her age, like the Little League pitchers with a 55 mph fastball and 5 o clock shadow.
The ability to choose something and explore it deeply in all its aspects is a strength, once you find the right school.
Ms Kate-
Can you provide a link for this claim. Everything I am finding online is saying that both chicken pox and shingles are caused by the same virus.
I’m all for giving the vaccines, but spreading them out a bit more. I’m due at the end of next month, and from my understanding, the normal plan is to vaccinate for HepB before the baby even leaves the hospital. I know I’ve been tested for everything left, right and sideways - can he really pick up HepB between the hospital and home? I printed out the CDC’s recommended vaccination schedule, as well as the schedule published by the UK’s NHS, and scheduled an appointment with the pediatrician I’m planning on using to see if there’s any way to spread the vaccines out a bit. I worked in a vet clinic, and we didn’t even recommend giving all the shots at once to smaller animals, because of the risk of vaccine reactions. 4 or 5 shots at once seems a little much to ask any 10 pound creature to handle.
Whooping cough has intermittent vaccine coverage, too. I was vaccinated as normal, but contracted it as a teenager.
Also, the chicken pox vaccine can be very useful for those of us who didn’t contract it in childhood. Becuase I got vaccinated when I was 13, I don’t have to worry about being exposed to the disease as an adult.
Unlike my mother, who never got the chickenpox, and is in her sixties now. It would be a potential disaster if she ever got it.
Whooping cough has intermittent vaccine coverage, too. I was vaccinated as normal, but contracted it as a teenager.
Also, the chicken pox vaccine can be very useful for those of us who didn’t contract it in childhood. Becuase I got vaccinated when I was 13, I don’t have to worry about being exposed to the disease as an adult.
Unlike my mother, who never got the chickenpox, and is in her sixties now. It would be a potential disaster if she ever got it.
“Ms. Kate is partially right about the CDC. Their recommendation for the HPV vaccine up to age 26 is mostly just giving money to Merck. The stats (average # of partners at that age, etc) don’t bear out the recommendation, but hey, what the hell?”
Oh, please. And what about those of us who are 25 and haven’t had enough partners to make it unreasonable? I should just avoid the shots to… what? Avoid making strangers uncomfortable?
Nope, 10. He’s twice exceptional. Scores through the roof on math and science, but struggles with basic penmanship and following instructions.
Well, you all do “know” someone who had mumps–me. Just one side of my face blew up.
My mom was horrified b/c she thought that I’d had all my vaccines. Idiot country doctor forgot about that one.
After I recovered, I had to return and get the vaccine anyway b/c it protects against measles and rubella as well as mumps. I was not happy.
Idiot doctor screwed me over again b/c he didn’t record giving me the vaccine.
So when it was time for college, I only had proof of one booster shot from a different less idiotic doctor. My current intelligent doctor told me he could test for the immunities, but if they weren’t there, I’d have to get another shot. I said if I had to get stuck, he might as well just give me the vaccine.
Vaccines are not 100% safe nor are they 100% effective. That’s why I get particularly pissed off at the anti-vacciners. Not only are they piggybacking off the majority who do vaccinate, but if there is an outbreak, they help spread it to those for whom the vaccine didn’t work.
They ARE caused by the same virus - the problem is that the assertion that the vaccine prevents shingles is just that - an assertion.
Shingles is typically found in temporarily or permanently immune compromised individuals (think Magic Johnson here). There is no evidence that such individuals will remain sufficiently immune from varicella in later life even if they are vaccinated to not contract the virus and develop shingles even if they have no classic spot symptoms.
Todd, is it possible for a playdate with my 10 year old son, or are you just passing my guy off as your own here?
(younger son is 10 and dabbles with aspyness, but receives no special services for the time being)
Todd, we’re waiting for the ’sequencing problems’ (following 4 step directions given by another, rather than complex math solved on her own initiative) to either persist until clinical or clear up like everything else.
Unique strengths, that’s what they are.
Yes, but chicken pox is the initial outbreak if you dont get chicken pox you wont have the virus in your system (I recognize not in all cases but in most). I would say this is an argument to get a booster vaccine so you never get the virus since chicken pox later in life is quite nasty.
“I mean, even if thimerosal does not cause autism, WHY IN THE HELL are we putting unnecessary mercury in our infant’s vaccines?”
Leora, in the late 1920’s, a group of 21 children was infected with staph from a diphtheria inoculation, and 12 died. Thimerosal was the only compound known that prevented contamination of the vaccines with staph and fungi while not diminishing its effectiveness. You may never have had the misfortune of studying organic chemistry, but in general you don’t just whip up a new compound with the same function but lacking mercury. When you consider how people were ravaged by these diseases in the first half of last century, I doubt anyone really gave a damn about the mercury risk, though it exists, to be sure. Happily, advances have been made. I guess Big Pharma is good for something.
RES, it is true that if you never had the fulminant infection, you wouldn’t have the latent virus.
Unless you are immune compromised, as most shingles cases are. Then you might contract it later, regardless of vaccination status, because you are … immune compromised!
The simple answer: no data yet exists to prove disprove, as shingles is usually found in mid-life or later, so it is simply an assumption, not a fact, that shingles will be prevented by vaccination.
I don’t know why this would indicate that the vaccine was causing autism. Problems for people who turn out to be autistic, yeah sure.My mother told me of the panic and fear that came every summer when parents wondered if there would be a polio epidemic that season. I was born the year that Salk began his vaccination trials, I can barely imagine my parent’s relief.
At eight I was out of school for two weeks from the measles, and learned later that my mom and dad were hours away from hospitalizing me, when I finally made a turn for the better. Our neighbor’s youngest boy was 80% deaf because his mother contracted rubella in her first trimester. Since my dad worked at the local county health department, I heard stories all through my childhood of mini epidemics, mumps, measles, rubella, whooping cough, and on and on, even typhoid.
Try typing “plagues” on wikipedia. We’re all just one mutation away from disaster.
Thanks for calling me a misguided liberal. Do I have to hand in my feminist card too now?
I have a pretty long memory, thanks. Also, you may be shocked, the ability to research and think for myself.
I saw Dr. Bernardine Healey, former head of the American Red Cross, pitching the vaccines-as-cause theory this very morning.
Who’s paying her, anyway? She sounds like one of those global warming deniers from Exxon, saying it’s a huge failure of public health research, and implying (much like Expelled), that there’s a conspiracy afoot.
The woman is dangerous. And a hooo-er.
I worked with some of this country’s finest autism researchers in my time at the Child Development Center at Very Large University Research Hospital.
There’s no freakin’ link!
The really good researchers are going back to video of diagnosed kids when they were tiny, and finding similarities in their gross motor behavior—long before they got the dreaded MMR vaccine.
I don’t know how relevant this is now, but I find it interesting that vaccination came to the developed world through Muslims and women. A quick reference from Wikipedia:
‘In 1718, Lady Mary Wortley Montague reported that the Turks have a habit of deliberately inoculating themselves with fluid taken from mild cases of smallpox and she inoculated her own children.[2]Before Edward Jenner tested the possibility of using the cowpox vaccine as an immunisation for smallpox in humans in 1796 for the first time, at least six people had done the same several years earlier: a person whose identity is unknown, England, (about 1771), Mrs. Sevel, Germany (about 1772), Mr. Jensen, Germany (about 1770), Benjamin Jesty, England, in 1774, Mrs. Rendall, England (about 1782) and Peter Plett, Germany, in 1791.[3] In 1796 Edward Jenner inoculated using cowpox (a mild relative of the deadly smallpox virus). Pasteur and others built on this.[1]’
I can’t be the only one who, every time vaccines come up in discussion, recalls the “tiny baby coffins” speech in House.
I’m with Amanda on this one.
Ok, a couple of things here:
To all the people worried about multiple vaccinations at the same time: do you have any evidence that this is harmful, or are you just running with your gut? The last time I checked, the Institute of Medicine report I noticed on the subject concluded exactly the opposite.
Ms. Kate, I don’t know where you’re getting your news, but the recent outbreaks across the country were all in unvaccinated populations.
Mnemosyne: having a child who had a previous bad reaction to a vaccine is not an irrational reason for not vaccinating.
And those children are the ones who should profit from herd immunity without contributing to it.
I’m lucky, I never had an averse reaction to anything — even the localized pain from a tetanus shot is something I only notice when I concentrate on it. And I got all vaccinations available when I was a kid: My mother had lost childhood friends to diphteria and polio.
PhoenixRising: I’m pretty sure that ‘You’re an over-entitled, scientifically ignorant ingrate who would change your ways if you’d seen a kid with tetanus die right in front of you, like I did’ was my all-time least effective comment in response to the statement ‘We’re not vaccinating’, though.
Wasn’t there a House episode with a scene like that?
Ashley, I remember when I was a kid chicken pox was considered no big deal. Now that there’s a vaccine, chicken pox can kill you?
Generally, if you cannot avoid a risk, you are likely to play it down. If you can avoid it, you’re likely to consider it much more severe. Riding without a seatbelt wasn’t a big deal when there weren’t seatbelts. Also, what does not kill you doesn’t necessarily make you stronger. It might simply leave you handicapped.
Also, chicken pox like to stay with you. A friend recently got shingles all over her head, which, if wikipedia is to be believed, is caused by the chicken pox virus making itself comfortable in your body after you got well all by yourself, and waiting for a chance to make a comeback.
She said she wished chicken pox had killed her. Because it hurt like bloody hell for three weeks, and she has still occasional attacks of nerve pain months after. (The doc says it’s likely to fade. Lucky.)
Esteleth, that was one of the most cogent essays regarding autism I have ever read. Thank you very much- I am going to save it and re-read…
Your analysis is IMO spot-on; I suspect my 63 year old mom would also have been diagnosed as ASD years ago.
Unree, I’m sorry if I was strident and glad you understood it was out of concern for your/ a child’s immediate situation. BEEN THERE.
Certainly Jean has frustrated me to the point where I have had to go outside, sit in my car, and scream until my ears rang. And at that moment, things look bleak.
But that’s why respite is so critical. I didn’t understand that myself for a long time… then Jean and I found a formula (from Blue’s Clues, of all places) that was simple and worked for us. I made it into a poster for all of us:
“ARE YOU FRUSTRATED?”
1. STOP.
2. TAKE A DEEP BREATH.
3. THINK.
(then our own addition)
4. START OVER
It’s been a formula that has worked for our family for over 5 years now, not just for Jean- but for all of us. In fact, she has transitioned from a very frustrated little girl into our family’s voice of reason, peacemaker and compass.
She is very logical, forgiving, and methodical. Having a set procedure like this helps her cope and develop a comfort level. And whenever the world around her is overwhelming or gets to be confusing, she now has a coping mechanism.
Utter bullhockey. You are referring to the completely discredited findings of Dr Andrew Wakefield, who claimed to find some form of measles infection in the intestinal tract. Except it turned out he was using PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction, an extremely sensitive DNA amplification technique) with no controls, and the results were entirely caused by contamination in his own lab.
Additionally, it also turned out that Dr Wakefield collected blood samples at a children’s birthday party, for cash, then joked at a seminar about how completely unethical this is. He was also paid large amounts of money by lawyers looking to support “vaccine damage” claims. And none of his invasive (and potentially life-threatening) research on children was ever approved by an ethics committee.
He is currently facing severe censure from the British Medical Association.
Chicken pox, flu and measles are all potentially lethal, and non-lethal cases can cause severe and permanently disabling side-effects, including (but not limited to) deafness, blindness and paralysis.
To all the people worried about multiple vaccinations at the same time: do you have any evidence that this is harmful, or are you just running with your gut?
Cain, go read the fucking thread. Specifically comments by Phoenix Rising.
Sorry that I can’t make it any easier for you.
Under the medical principle of “first do no harm”, the vaccination schedule, as it is, needs to be medically justified rather than deified and defended. There is no medical reason to pile them up like they are currently scheduled, and the piling them on obscures the ability to isolate the vaccine components to which some kids are sensitive/allergic. Yet parents who question this are labeled “resisters” and get the answer that “we can’t trust parents to bring their kids to the doctor because parents are stoopid and don’t care so we have to do them all now”, even though they are multi-part vaccines.
Many vaccines really DO need to be given to very young children … others can be spaced out to as late as the 5th birthday and still make the school requirements and confer adequate protection.
Oh, and I hold a PhD in public health (epidemiology) so you can’t brand me as a silly reactionary parent, either.
Dunc, you need a sense of proportion.
Wakefield is a crank and chicken pox can get lethal, but usually only for kids who are immune compromised and wouldn’t be able to receive the vaccine anyway, or for adults who have the misadventure to not have had it as kids. If anything, we should be vaccinating the adults rather than charging them outrageous amounts for the shot (unless they lie about “wanting to get pregnant”) if the prevention of fatal or serious consequences is the goal.
Flu is actually more serious because it mutates so much, but guess what? Flu shots are not offered to kids at flu clinics, and they are not free or even subsidized by insurance if you actually manage to get a doctor who will immunize kids at all and is able to get the vaccine! Bonus points: you get lied to when you take your 12 year old 105 pound kid for one - I was told that it is a “different vaccine for kids under 18″ when it is only that way for kids under 3!
And people wonder why people get suspicious of the competence and motivations of the whole system?
PhoenixRising: “It has sometimes been productive to point out to them that in fact, they are permitted to demand one vaccine at a time with waiting periods. This allows their children to recover from each assault and will help to isolate the cause should there be a reaction.
Of course I’d appreciate some of the effort that pro-science progressives like to put into slurring the ignorant, privileged parents who refuse to vaccinate being re-directed into pushing for insurance coverage on vaccines that pays per shot, not per visit, but I have other primary issues that I’m working on. ”
Exactly. That is what everyone should be focussing on.
My husband and I are currently trying to conceive, and plan to vaccinate our children on a spread-out schedule so any adverse reactions can be isolated. (I was born in 1972 — I was looking through my childhood medical files and my vax schedule was thorough but the measles, mumps and rubella were spaced out by over 6 months.) Lobby for insurance coverage (and single payer, while you are at it) to accommodate a saner vax schedule. Everybody wins.
Amanda: re: “Big Pharma does a lot of wrong things, but mainly because they charge too much for products that are actually good. If they were charging too much for products that were just crap, then they’d be no more a political problem than people who make designer handbags.” People’s distrust of “Big Pharma” comes from a lot more than that, and there’s a difference between Big Pharma and “science”. (I know you were ranting and that you know this, but I think it’s an important clarification. )
The collusion of the pharmaceutical industry and the insurance industry to inflate the prices of necessary drugs is a moral problem — but there are also many big moneymaking drugs that pass the FDA, get widely prescribed, and turn out to either not deliver the promised results or have serious side effects. Look at Vioxx, for example, or the widespread prescription of statins which, as it turns out, aren’t as effective as promised and can have some serious side effects — but Lipitor has made a ton of money for Pfizer. Or take a look at the Frontline piece on medicated children if you haven’t seen it: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/medicatedchild/
Then there’s the readiness and haste with which doctors will prescribe antidepressants. Antidepressant drugs can be lifesavers for some (just like the pill!) but can have horrible side effects and contraindications for others (again, just like the pill!) and so many people I know have had doctors just throw antidepressant scrips at them without much consideration of the side effects. The worst scenario personally known to me being that my mother, having developed crippling osteoartritis, (and already on a regimen of statins, blood pressure meds, and NSAIDs) was referred to an arthritis specialist who gave her a painkiller, said she “seemed depressed” and gave her a scrip for Lexapro. And she was found dead in her apartment 3 weeks later. And lo! when I read the contraindications on all her meds, it turns out Lexapro can kill you if you are: over 60, smoke, take statins, NSAIDs, and blood pressure meds, and I wonder how many Lexapro pens were probably in this guy’s office and how many fancy dinners were bought for him by the rep. Oh, and the US is the only country that allows pharmaceutical advertising.
So although I share your anger at the foolishness and selfishness of the anti-vax crowd, just because they like to use “distrust at Big Pharma” as part of their arsenal of “arguments” against vaccinating doesn’t make distrust of pharmaceutical companies a waste of time. There’s plenty to distrust, just not on the B.S. vax-autism front.
I am so very happy to finally read a reality-based online discussion of vaccinations!
Ms. Kate is right about the flu being a big deal. Approximately 60,000 die in the US each year from the flu adn flu-related illnesses. The majority of those are the elderly AND the very young. My employer offers flu shots for free through our state employees health plan to all of us. Our families can also get one but it costs about $20. Usually you can also get one at the health department.
Unfortunately, it is very difficult to get one at our pediatrician’s office. Evidently all the shots go to walmart and cvs so they can sell them at flu clinics.
My father is a pediatrician and he actually “fires” patients who refuse to vaccinate. He simply tells them he can no longer see them. If they then change their mind, he still cannot see them, because that would be unethically forcing them to vaccinate. He does try to work with them first and supply them with information regarding vaccinations. He actaully succeeded in convincing a fundamentalist mother of 12 to get hers vaccinated.
A lot of people around here don’t want to get their kids vaccinated bc they want to control their own lives and health choices. Hippie-to-do-dahs. When I get sick I want someone with multiple degrees and board certifications taking care of me. I do not want to go chew on a twig in a hut in the woods.
My understanding about flu shots in general, which may be based on an outdated approach, is that the only people recommended to get it were the elderly and people with health problems that can be dramatically exacerbated by a bout with the flu. Otherwise healthy children are not at abnormal risk and thus are generally not recommended to have a flu shot each year.
My understanding is that the flu shot is meant to prevent fatalities and severe complications, not to make us all more efficient little cogs in our respective corporate machines. Though I’ll also say that I got the flu for the first time in my life this year, and it SUCKED. I might give in on the shot next year.
Herd immuity holds true for flu as well. Although, it’s not really immunity, more like resistance. And while it is recommended for elderly and those with other health problems, all young children are also in that high-risk group. It doesn’t do my child that much good though if we get him the shot, but do not ourselves. He can still get the flu from us if we come down with it, but it will hopefully just be a less severe case. You can also get your flu protection through a nasal application now instead of a shot - although I am not sure it is approved for all groups.
Oh, and as someone who had a VERY severe case of chickenpox as a child - mine got vaccinated. There is really no reason not too bc although one can have a mild case, one can also develop a very serious illness.
RE: dr.’s offices and drug companies
The courting of doctor’s by drug reps is INTENSE. Reps have leeway to do all sorts of things, not just give free “goodies” like pens and drug samples, but also provide dinners, tickets to ball games, etc. Some doctor’s are imune to this, but of course, there are those that aren’t. Just like with any other profession, there ar egood doctors and bad doctors.
I can still remember when drug companies were not allowed to advertise their product by name on tv and certainly not tell the view to ask their doctor about prescribing the drug.
But hopefully, things are about to change:
http://www.charlotte.com/112/story/620097.html
“My understanding about flu shots in general, which may be based on an outdated approach, is that the only people recommended to get it were the elderly and people with health problems that can be dramatically exacerbated by a bout with the flu. Otherwise healthy children are not at abnormal risk and thus are generally not recommended to have a flu shot each year.”
Oh wow. No. Flu epidemics…and by flu I mean INFLUENZA, which is what the vaccines are for, not “flu the illness that has no name that kinda makes me feel crappy for a week or so”…are terrible and have killed millions of people in the last century alone. Even in non-epidemic years, hundreds of thousands of people die. The Spanish Flu in the early 20th century, for instance, killed as many people as the Black Plague did. *Everyone* for whom it is not contraindicated for health reasons is recommended to get the flu vaccine, though of course it’s more important for some people to get it than others. But anyone can die of the flu and anyone can carry and transmit the flu to someone who is more susceptible to it than the baseline population.
Phoenix, you’re lucky I’m a nice person, because the various retorts I can think of to your insult to me will not be typed.
I’m more than aware of what life with small children is like. Like a lot of willfully childless people, I grew up the oldest of a whole mess of children and saw every runny nose and medical emergency and concluded that children are more trouble than they’re worth. But what that experience also means is that I’m actually not “inexperienced” with the ways of small children. The people who have kids and find themselves impressed with how hard it really is are more likely to be the ones who were unaware of the ways of small children and had to have a trial by fire.
I personally did not understand the seriousness or severity of Polio until I was in the 8th grade and my math teacher (almost at retirement, so 60+) had a gimpy leg and a bad heart… but told us all how luck he had been because his sister died from polio while he lived. He was still having heart problems and corrective surgeries 50 years later.
As far as chicken pox, if the point is really to immunize for those who don’t get it as children, would it not be just as effective to immunize at age 10 or 15 if they hadn’t caught it yet?
(and as for the sending kids to play with other infected children; I’m one of 4, chicken pox went around our neighbourhood three times and my mother, the RN, sent us to play with the other families every time… but we didn’t get it then. In fact, it had to go through our house on 4 seperate occasions to hit us all since we didn’t even manage to pick it up from each other!)
I printed out the CDC’s recommended vaccination schedule, as well as the schedule published by the UK’s NHS, and scheduled an appointment with the pediatrician I’m planning on using to see if there’s any way to spread the vaccines out a bit.
If the pediatrician tells you no, find a different pediatrician. One of my co-workers is concerned about vaccines because her brother-in-law is autistic, so she found a doctor who will let her vaccinate one at a time instead of piling them all on top of one another. That way, if one does cause some kind of bad reaction, they’ll be able to tell which one it was.
“As far as chicken pox, if the point is really to immunize for those who don’t get it as children, would it not be just as effective to immunize at age 10 or 15 if they hadn’t caught it yet?”
There’s not really just one point to the chicken pox vaccine. Even kids can get really sick from it. Even kids who don’t get really sick from it can wind up with lingering scars (a few of mine were recently mistaken, almost two decades later, for biopsy scars by my dermatologist) or the possibility of shingles later in life. Even adults who’ve had it can still wind up with another bout of it if the first was fairly mild or their immune systems, for some reason, don’t recognize the virus as something they’ve dealt with before.
I am not anti-vax, and my son had his, though slightly delayed to my getting laid off and losing my insurance–which in this case, worked in my favor, as I did not want to cluster-bomb his immune system.
Anyway, I think the outrage around here about people who dare to question medical received wisdom is a bit odd for this crowd (hello, thalidomide, forced sterilzations of the “unfit”, Tuskegee, shall I go on?). It’s one thing to say “anti-vax is unscientific and dangerous” it’s another to say “why don’t you idiots trust those doctors?” Well, you know, there is a *slight* history in this country of the medical establishment being a) wrong and b) criminally wrong. Anti-vax sentiment feeds on that knowledge and that fear, plus the added desire, as a parent, to protect your kid from people who’ve you’ve been convinced will hurt them. It’s not about twig-chewing; it’s about that fear.
Anti-vaxers don’t have some inexplicable drive to infect all the rest of us; they’re afraid, and sadly, the history of medicine in this country has given them plenty of reason to feel that way. In this case, they happen to be wrong, but until those studies were done to disprove thimerosol causing autism, I found the general contempt, lack of transparency, and legislative ass-covering by the medical and pharma industries to be, oh, a wee bit suspicious myself. And you know what? The fact was, they were scared because they didn’t know, either, if they had been causing autism; and they were scared, because they would, in fact, be criminally liable. Because they hadn’t done any research on it until then, and they should have.
Treating parents who want to protect their kids as idiots is not going to solve anything. You have to understand what it is that motivates them.
Since there seems to be some questions and confusions about the chicken pox vaccine, I thought I might link the CDC info page on it.
http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd-vac/varicella/
Also, VZV is the virus that causes chicken pox & shingles (herpes zoster). The latter however isn’t from a new infection, but from reactivation of latent infection. People who get chicken pox are forever infected with VZV. From what I understand, it isn’t really known if the vaccine would help prevent shingles in an already infected individual. Also, we don’t know how long resistance from the vaccine lasts. It very well might be one that needs boosting after so many years.
Fifteen years ago, one uncle died of infant pneumonia at 3 months old, because the vaccine was not yet available. Baby coffins are not cute. A long time ago, another uncle died of polio, because the vaccine was not yet available. My mom has told me many stories of visiting him in the hospital while he was in the iron lung. You bet my kids are fully immunized. However, my doctor was very cool with spreading out the immunizations - we stretched them out as far as the state daycare rules let us. As my daughter was one of the 1 in 3,000 who gets measles from the MMR, I was especially grateful for his common sense. I can say that it was pretty awful - we alternated doses of Motrin and Tylenol every two hours and kept her in a diaper only and the house at 68 degrees, all to keep her fever at around 103, for a week.
My sister had Guillain-Barre when she was younger and now cannot get boosters for anything (except maybe tetanus) and cannot get flu shots. She is dependent on herd immunity to keep from getting sick, and it drives me nuts when people who CAN get immunized WON’T because it’s “unnatural” or because the risk of a reaction is nonzero. I am not knocking people with legitimate concerns about adverse reactions (because my sister is in that boat), but I think this anti-vaccine movement is one more piece of evidence proving that our social contract is falling apart.
BTW, another reason for early vaccination with the chicken pox vaccine (or any other vaccine, really) is that it decreases the likelihood that an adult who can catch the disease will be exposed - sort of a “bigger herd” provision in the herd immunity concept.
Fifteen years ago, one uncle died of infant pneumonia at 3 months old, because the vaccine was not yet available. Baby coffins are not cute. A long time ago, another uncle died of polio, because the vaccine was not yet available. My mom has told me many stories of visiting him in the hospital while he was in the iron lung. You bet my kids are fully immunized. However, my doctor was very cool with spreading out the immunizations - we stretched them out as far as the state daycare rules let us. As my daughter was one of the 1 in 3,000 who gets measles from the MMR, I was especially grateful for his common sense. I can say that it was pretty awful - we alternated doses of Motrin and Tylenol every two hours and kept her in a diaper only and the house at 68 degrees, all to keep her fever at around 103, for a week.
My sister had Guillain-Barre when she was younger and now cannot get boosters for anything (except maybe tetanus) and cannot get flu shots. She is dependent on herd immunity to keep from getting sick, and it drives me nuts when people who CAN get immunized WON’T because it’s “unnatural” or because the risk of a reaction is nonzero. I am not knocking people with legitimate concerns about adverse reactions (because my sister is in that boat), but I think this anti-vaccine movement is one more piece of evidence proving that our social contract is falling apart.
BTW, another reason for early vaccination with the chicken pox vaccine (or any other vaccine, really) is that it decreases the likelihood that an adult who can catch the disease will be exposed - sort of a “bigger herd” provision in the herd immunity concept.
I apologize if this is a double post - I seem to be having bad luck posting lately.
What I find really interesting about the flu vaccine debate is that every year there’s major paranoia about a huge outbreak and how we’re all going to die, and then as soon as it happens you don’t hear a peep from the media.
So, run up to last year, lots and lots of panic about the coming flu pandemic. Lots of people get shots, including most of my friends (but not me or my husband). Come February, everyone I know is sick with something I called “the plague.” Coughing, sore throat, incredible fatigue and malaise, super high fever, etc. etc. I had many many friends laid up in bed for days, 2 who went to the hospital for it. They were told they had “the flu.”
Perhaps the state of Illinois isn’t a large enough area for a gigantic flu outbreak to register as a pandemic, but not once did I hear a news story about how everyone is sick, not even in local news. I swear at least 50% of my friends, coworkers, and casual acquaintances spent a few days at home due to “the plague” this winter. Even my friends with the flu shots, who were so cocky “oh we’ll never get it. We got the shot!” almost wound up in the hospital with the flu.
I managed to avoid it by religiously avoiding anyone I knew who came down with it. Self-quarantine worked a hell of a lot better than the vaccine.
So yeah, why does no one mention the flu pandemic that happened in Illinois this winter?
Ashley,
because it wasn’t a pandemic, for one, and because the regular flu is not necessarily what people worry about when they talk about the possibility of a global epidemic.
What you experienced was, dare I say it, normal. What the world is worried about is a repeat of the 1918 Spanish flu, not a run-of-the-mill flu season.
So yeah, why does no one mention the flu pandemic that happened in Illinois this winter?
You mean other than all of the stories about how this was an unusually severe flu season and how the yearly gamble on which flu strain will be worst failed and people who got the flu shot this year weren’t protected against the strain that surfaced?
You might want to try reading the news online every once in a while instead of relying on TV news. And, as mael mentioned, you may need to look up the definition of “pandemic.” Lots of people getting the flu is not a pandemic. Influenza 1918 was a pandemic. In October of 1918 alone, 195,000 people died of the Spanish flu. Not felt a little sick. Not off work for a week. Died.
One more thing to add. Anyone who has lived in other countries knows that there is a lot of culture in medicine, though they would have you believe it is all very “scientific.” Even between two equally developed and scientific countries, you will often find different treatments for common conditions. Vaccine schedules are part of that. I’m not saying vaccines aren’t science-based or that they don’t work. But how we make the cost-benefit analysis of any particular one is as much cultural as scientific. And general practitioners often are following whatever guidelines are set by the AMA or their specialty association/whatever reimbursement practices are allowed by insurance companies in their area. They aren’t scouring the latest literature to make the most up-to-date recommendations to their patients.
Ms Kate:
Emphasis of the most important word here mine. I believe it is you who need a sense of proportion - the chances of severely negative outcomes for chickenpox infection, even in a healthy kid, are significantly higher than the chances of a severe adverse reaction to the vaccine. In a large population, those differential risks add up to significant numbers.
Plus, the only way to protect those kids who can’t safely be vaccinated (you know, the ones at greatest risk of the most severe outcomes) is to maintain a high level of herd immunity. What was your plan for dealing with that? Pretend they don’t exist, or that there aren’t enough of them to matter? Or just quarantine them?
Finally, it’s not my fault you’re unfortunate enough to live in a country with a stupid profit-based healthcare system. Any arguments or remarks about how hard is it to get a given shot, or how much it costs, etc, are completely beside the point. The point is that vaccination is vastly safer than non-vaccination, both for the individual in question, and for everyone else.
Mnemosyne: Thanks for assuming that, since I seem to be a frequent commenter on this blog, I MUST get all my news from the T.V.
As shown by “Stuff White People Like,” I, like many white people, don’t watch t.v. Don’t even have t.v. access at all.
I saw NOT. ONE. article or editorial in my local newspaper or the Chicago Tribune, let alone google news, any blog, or larger publication. If this was widely reported, clearly I missed it. Do you have links of these articles?
And excuse me for misusing the term pandemic. What I meant was “Everyone I fucking know is sick. A lot. Many with 104* fevers and a few in the hospital.” Clearly that’s normal and nothing to be concerned about.
Oh wait, what was that up thread, about how measles is a horrible disease that can cause brain damage from super high fevers and clearly we need to vaccinate our (checks CDC schedule) 1 year old from it?
But if it’s the flu it’s not a big deal at all. Clearly.
No, what happened this year was not as bad as 1918, but what DID happen this year is the worst “insert term here for everyone I know is really fucking sick” I’ve ever seen. It was very very bad for a lot of people and dismissing it as “normal” and “feeling a little sick” when it was more “can’t get out of bed and have a 104 fever” is insulting and wrong.
Well, not as long as you keep them in their well-disinfected isolettes.
And speaking of science v. culture, I’m surprised so many people can’t get their kids the flu vaccine. My son’s pediatrician gives all his patients the flu shot. And it’s really easy for us b/c kiddo’s b-day is in November, early in the season, when there’s still plenty of vaccine, and we just get it with his check-up instead of needing an extra visit.
Ashely,
what happened to you this winter is, indeed, normal. What normal means, for influenza, is that this was a year in which symptoms tended to be more severe, rather than less.
Tell me, how many healthy adults died of influenza in Illinois this flu season?
The flu is bad, obviously, but you’re seriously overreacting. It was not a pandemic. Even if you did misuse the term, in your situation “everyone I know is sick” is not the definition of an epidemic. It’s the definition of a hyperbole.
Yeah, most people I know were also sick this winter. Most people I know, myself included, are sick almost every winter. That doesn’t mean it was a bloody epidemic worthy of being harped on.
Unree called autism (for the parent who must cope with it) “a punishment ended only by death.” Admittedly melodramatic but–that photograph is horrifying. I’m only 40ish so I have no memory of the horror of polio. To me that photograph looks like a punishment ended only by death. A childhood ended–to lay there day after day after day OMFG. And surely they didn’t survive anyway.
Here’s another related photo: an entire ward (looks like a factory floor) of iron lung patients.
Amanda, I wasn’t insulting you.
Your belief that autism is a joke and that you’re smarter and better than any parent who questions vaccinating is not compatible with easy, effortless parenting.
Having children is not just ‘hard’, it’s full of surprises both good and bad. The outright contempt for the lesser beings who put their own children’s welfare ahead of a public good that you displayed in this rant doesn’t evaporate easily when unexpected outcomes occur–ask me how I know.
You’re making a good choice.
I don’t buy the myth that it makes you a lesser person that you’re not cut out to raise children.
Three month olds, not being able to move around much, are pretty unlikely to step on rusty nails or otherwise get puncture wounds, even if left on the un-disinfected floor. In third-world countries, newborn tetanus is too common, usually from unsanitary cutting of the umbilical cord, but if the mother is up-to-date on her own tetanus vaccine, you could cut that sucker with just about anything and not get tetanus (other infections, but not tetanus).
I mean, here’s the deal. Vaccines, over all, are a good thing, a very good thing even. They have greatly reduced death and suffering. Yeah for vaccines. But we don’t need to exaggerate the dangers of childhood to make the case. As someone else commented, we tend to downplay those dangers we can’t prevent and play up the danger of things we can.
Dang! Here’s that URL:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Iron_Lung_ward-Rancho_Los_Amigos_Hospital.gif
First, the flu shot doesn’t give you immunity to the illness. You can still get the flu. However, by getting the shot, you are giving your body a much, much better chance of staving off any strains of flu virusus you encounter out there at work or school, etc. In addition, if you do contract the flu, you generally have lesser symptoms. And full-blown flu is not a i’m-i-bed-a day-or-so illness; it’s more like i’m killed and out of work for a week illness.
Secondly, children generally, but not always, receive tetanus shots at one year - when they are perfectly capable to getting a scratch or puncture would from something. We had to take out son to the ER for stitches this weekend and they confirmed with our doctor’s office that he was indeed current on that particular shot. And he’s only 2.
“A childhood ended–to lay there day after day after day OMFG. And surely they didn’t survive anyway.”
Actually the survival rates were pretty good, with many being able to leave the iron lung after the acute symptoms calmed down. Of course many were left permanently crippled in some way. (FDR, for example)
The scariest aspect of it I’ve heard is “Post-Polio Syndrome“. You think you’re over and done with it, and then you suffer all over again decades later.
Pretty rotten stuff, and it’s sad that we haven’t eliminated it yet…
I was lucky to have been born late enough (1960) that most new cases of Polio had already been eliminated in the US, so at least that was one terror I didn’t have to face. However, like most of my generation, I have a nice scar on my left arm from the Smallpox vaccination…
About five years ago at my previous position, my boss had his left calf muscle sudden wither away. I mean, overnight. It turned out to be from childhood polio he had contracted 50-odd years earlier. Very scary indeed.
Oh wow. No. Flu epidemics…and by flu I mean INFLUENZA, which is what the vaccines are for, not “flu the illness that has no name that kinda makes me feel crappy for a week or so”…are terrible and have killed millions of people in the last century alone. Even in non-epidemic years, hundreds of thousands of people die. The Spanish Flu in the early 20th century, for instance, killed as many people as the Black Plague did.
Uh, yeah, I know.
But thanks for condescending, all the same.
While influenza kills plenty of people, the vast, vast, VAST majority of people for whom it is a real threat are the elderly and people with specific health problems. People who should get a flu shot. The 1918 epidemic is the only time in modern medical memory where young and healthy people were at risk. And I mean risk of death or serious health consequences, not at risk of getting it.
The main reason I don’t get flu shots is that there is no real way to know which strain of the flu will be going around in any particular season, which means it’s just as easy to take the shot and still get the flu. There is no such thing as flu shot related herd immunity. If I worked closely with small children or the elderly (or other at-risk groups), I would definitely get the flu shot. If I had small children or was the primary caregiver for an elderly person, ditto. But I’m not, and I’ve had the flu exactly once in 27 years, so for now I will keep doing what I’m doing.
Not to mention that the fact that it’s difficult for the people who need the vaccine to get it via their doctor, but workplaces offer it for free to people who are not particularly at risk (thus creating shortages…) completely squicks me out. It’s what leads me down the road of assuming all this willy-nilly flu vaccinating has more to do with the corporate bottom line than actually giving a damn about public health.
MikeEss, thanks for that clarification. I feel better (except for the post-polio scare). See how Ye Modren Public is ignorant of the polio facts?
Opoponax, I am so thankful I got my flu shot this year…my entire office was out, flat on their backs, and I was terrified I’d catch it, not for my sake but because I’d probably give it to our baby girl. It’s a bit of a lottery, sure–will the shot I’m getting be the same as the flu that strikes in my locality?–but when it works, it’s more than worth it.
1. There was a rather serious flu epidemic this year - in fact, there were two. The flu season is the worst in at least a decade (don’t have my MMWR handy here, but I am overseeing studies that will have to statistically adjust for the high prevalence of isolations in culture by week).
2. The flu shot protects against the three strains it includes and partially covers for related strains. The problem: the CDC picks the strains in February, and this time it really, really failed to predict the prevalent strains for not one but TWO strains. Two strains ripped through the population - an A strain that was only marginally related to a vaccine strain, and a B strain that was unrelated to anything seen in a decade or two.
3. In the northeast, small medical practices have very low priority on flu vaccine and they are very lucky if they get any at all sometimes and then they tend to get it in December or January. We tried in November and were told to go to a clinic as both my husband and myself are at higher risk and the pediatrician didn’t have any and didn’t know when they would. The clinics didn’t take the kids and lied or were unexcusably ignorant about the reason.
Dunc, present your credentials or get stuffed. 25-50 cases of fatal varicella due to comprimized immune systems are what epidemiolgists call “displaced mortality” and “competing causes”. In other words, these kids would die of colds or flu but varicella happened to get there first. They are often already segregated from other children, so the “herd immunity” issue is a strawman. They have been trotted out by crying duckies in merck ads for the sake of scare tactics, not because their sad deaths were preventable.
Opponax, I must point out that this year’s group B flu strain had an appetite for youngsters as it was related only to strains not seen in years.
Ms. Kate: Oh, and I hold a PhD in public health (epidemiology) so you can’t brand me as a silly reactionary parent, either.
As an epidemiology graduate student, all I can say is: seconded. The fact that the epidemiology professionals around here aren’t anti-resister should speak volumes about what’s really going on. It suggests that your perception of risk/benefit ratio are as skewed as the vaccine resisters’, albeit for fundamentally different reasons.
Case in point: the poster who commented that there were 365,000 deaths from measles worldwide in 2005. That’s true, but there’s a reason why infectious disease epidemiologists tend to ignore absolute numbers and think in terms of “number per 100,000 patients with the disease in X geographical/political region“. As I noted earlier, it’s around 100 fatalities per 100,000 U.S. measles patients and 10,000 fatalities per 100,000 African measles patients — a 1,000-fold difference. To put that into perspective, an American who actually contracts measles is about as likely to die from it as a 20-something American smoker and migraine patient faces from dying of a stroke or heart attack while using birth control pills. (102 per 100,000.) While those women face the highest risk of stroke of all BCP users, the important thing to remember is that 102 out of 100,000 means that 99.9% of people in the extremely high risk group are perfectly healthy. [Math: 100/100,000 = .001, or 1%. 102/100,000 = .00102, or 1.02%. 1-.001 = .999 or 99.9%. 1-.00102 = 99.898 — or, rounding to the 3 sig figs used in the original study, 99.9%.]
What really worries me is how vaccines for really critical diseases — namely tetanus and diptheria — are lumped with vaccines for diseases that are a) aren’t that bad and b) have disproportionately high side effect rates. While the doctors aren’t quite sure which vaccine sent me into anaphylactic shock, odds are it was reaction to the pertussis component of the DPT. But since it’s impossible to get tetanus and diptheria vaccines by themselves, people in my position are completely screwed.
As I see it, the solution is to stop trying to get private companies to produce vaccines and turn over vaccine production to the CDC. You wouldn’t run into the agency capture problems Kate described because private companies wouldn’t be involved, they’d be able to compensate the 100 in 100,000, and they’d be able to more effectively prepare for bioterrorist threats and pandemics. (By by “effective” I really mean “any direct involvement at all.” Because only states have legal authority over public health and welfare, the CDC does not have any legal authority to directly intervene in pandemics. Barring a Constitutional amendment, the only way we’re really going to have an effective public health and medical infrastructure is to give the CDC and/or the NIH the power to do this. And give them the ability to overrule the USDA on livestock treatment and food importation issues.)
Those people should be forced to visit people in Africa who have been crippled by polio. They should also then have to look those Africans in the eye and explain why it’s actually a good thing that they didn’t have access to vaccines.
Epi Grad Student, carry on!
I really think that the mandate for the varicella vaccine was what really turned some doubters into crazies, for good and bad reasons. The heavy handed mandate to vaccinate amok evidence of low population risk, coupled with a generation of parents who had never seen a real epidemic of dangerous diseases, produced doubt and fear about the real value of vaccination. I was in public health and had preschool children at the time, so I saw it all unfold (my older son had chicken pox about a six months before the vaccine became available).
Varicella did not become a mandatory vaccination because there is a public health threat - in fact, the public health community resisted adding an expensive vaccine when they couldn’t make a strong case for it given the risk. It became manditory when the vaccine manufacturers threatened to stop producing “unprofitable” vaccines if the public health authorities didn’t do them a favor and forcefully create a large market.
One thing you will learn (but seem to already know): it isn’t always about health and risk in this business!
I don’t think autism is a joke. Where did you get that idea? If I thought autism was a joke, I wouldn’t issue a strident defense of the families of autistics like this. They are in a vulnerable position. They shouldn’t be exploited by cranks.
Jesus Christ, it’s like white is black and up is down in here.
I get that the lies might initially offer some comfort. So what? Being told you’re getting a million dollar check in the mail is joyful until it doesn’t show up and you’re sitting around a million dollars in debt because you spent it before you realized you were fooled.
When you lie to parents of autistic children about vaccines, that’s what you’re doing. Lying. Even if you don’t mean to. And lies are counterproductive.
I can’t believe you think I think autism is a joke. Fucking Christ.
I take this shit seriously, which is why I get so angry at the cranks. Jesus Christ. The people spreading these bullshit stories about vaccinations are the one treating autism like it’s a joke, a political football in their crankery.
And sorry that not everyone is going to validate your choices by making the same ones. I don’t need you to be childless to validate my choices. Yet so many people seem to believe that my childless home is somehow a fucking statement about yours. I can’t say that I really care that much. You had kids, bully for you. Why so defensive about it?
I am so thankful I got my flu shot this year…my entire office was out, flat on their backs, and I was terrified I’d catch it, not for my sake but because I’d probably give it to our baby girl.
People with babies at home should DEFINITELY get flu shots.
Also, most of my office does not share my skepticism and went for the shot — we ALL got it, and all equally bad.
I must point out that this year’s group B flu strain had an appetite for youngsters as it was related only to strains not seen in years.
And how many of those cases resulted in death or extreme complications which will lead to future health problems? Getting the flu when you are young and healthy kind of sucks. Dying from the flu when you are young and healthy and it is not 1918 is pretty much unheard of, even this past year.
After spending way too much time in the last three years engaging with hard-core anti-vaxers, I have some sympathy with Amanda’s frustration at their willful refusal to engage with evidence. They will claim that vaccines cause everything from autism to asthma, allergies, SIDS, infertility, and many more. Present evidence that they are wrong, and they ignore it or they try to find some bogus reason to invalidate the researcher, journal, or institute as corrupted by the profit- motive. I don’t trust big companies and I believe in consumer advocacy, but the extent of this conspiracy theory is mind-boggling. The “cranks”* create so much doubt in new mothers (who are the parents most likely to even research this issue), that every mother is convinced they are doing something wrong, no matter which way they go. Pediatricians as a group are making the situation worse– too many treat the parents who would like to delay vaccination as if they are stupid and in general are not providing parents with adequate information about risks/benefits (far too many are not distributing the vaccine inserts as required by law). Too often pedis assume that the parents cannot reasonably weigh this information and end up coming off as true believers the parents cannot have a cooperative relationship with when it comes to their child’s healthcare decisions. I question the ethics of any doctor who “fires” patients for refusing to vaccinate– if all doctors in a region are pro-vax, who is supposed to give these kids check-ups for the NUMEROUS other health issues? Sounds like an abdication of professional duty.
I see the anti-vax movement as coming from a couple places:
1) The overmedicalization of our culture. We are an intervention-heavy culture and it defies scientific evidence. Indeed, many of these interventions are actually increasing patient injury. Obstetrics in this country has one of the worst track records in this regard, so it shouldn’t suprise us that new mothers would be most likely to resist what are regarded as unnecessary or too frequent interventions with their infant. I understand that much of the desire to intervene is the result of insane malpractice insurance rates and fear of being sued– which just illuminates the inherent flaws in our insurance system.
2) The myth of rugged-individualism. Based on the research I have seen, I tend to think autism is a combination of genetic predisposition and environmental factors– if you have the gene you would likely fall somewhere on the spectrum but some environmental catalyst(s) may push you further into the regressive end (which does not preclude a link to vaccines, but would suggest that children with the gene would be in the contraindicated categories for vaccination). All the talk about the MMR-autism link redirects attention away from the more likely causes of increased rates of autism, asthma, and other disorders for which vaccines are blamed. Instead of demanding our corporate overlords actually abide by sane environmental policies and reduce pollution, we make parents believe that vaccines are the problem and that it is up to them as individuals to solve it. It is really Libertarian in orientation.
3) The mommier-than-thou attitude. The impulse that makes Americans judge every decision and announce their disapproval to new parents seems to find a peculiar resonance in anti-vaxers. Often tied to Attachment Parenting and Natural Living, it becomes another way for moms to one-up each other– either as critics of the decision or defenders. Few other decisions (except circumcision, natural childbirth, and spanking) provoke such heated debates and fray relationships as quickly. It is really annoying.
I often wonder if sociologists have ever studies who is most likely to be anti-vax (I haven’t seen such a study)? From my own unscientific impressions, it tends to be two groups: a) middle to upper middle class white families living outside of major urban areas where populations are less transient, more have access to adequate medical care, and risks from the diseases are lower; and b) religious, primarily rural inhabitants who see vaccines as unnatural. If anyone has an accurate breakdown, I would be very interested in seeing it.
*I reserve this term for two types: 1) those who run the anti-vax movement and dupe well-meaning parents with pseudo-scientific information or intentionally misinterpret scientific findings to reach conclusions the original researchers never made; 2) those parents who claim that they are the only one’s who have done the research because if other parents had the information they WOULD NEVER vaccinate; ergo, if an informed person vaccinates they are basically committing a form of child abuse.
**My apologies for the length
It’s too bad you equate “condescencion” with “being shocked at the level of your ignorance but making an effort not to be mean about it when providing the correct information.” You can stop the “condescension” by ceasing to expose your ignorance in a wildly public fashion, cause I just can’t help it, I am pathologically unable to just sit back and watch someone else spread misinformation. Especially about serious medical shit.
“The 1918 epidemic is the only time in modern medical memory where young and healthy people were at risk. And I mean risk of death or serious health consequences, not at risk of getting it.
The main reason I don’t get flu shots is that there is no real way to know which strain of the flu will be going around in any particular season, which means it’s just as easy to take the shot and still get the flu. There is no such thing as flu shot related herd immunity.”
Some whoppers here, for instance!
-in the 1950s, the death toll from the Asian flu pandemic in the United States was about 70,000, a good chunk of which were young healthy adults.
-the flu vaccine gives you partial protection from strains that are not too distant, genetically speaking, from the strains it was designed against, as well as close to 90% protection from those specific strains
-the more people are vaccinated for the season, the fewer people will be infected and spread the disease around to the non-vaccinated for the season, so by not getting vaccinated, you are helping to spread it more thoroughly that season.
Amanda, I hesitate to say this because when I stick my foot in my mouth around here it’s usually trying to defend someone who is perfectly capable of defending themselves. But if you read PhoenixRising honestly, she is not asking you to justify her choices. She is asking you to put yourself in someone else’s shoes before you make pronouncements about them and their motives. Her first post may not have been the most politic, but if my child had suffered a very serious vaccine-related injury (and yes, they happen, and no, I’m not talking about autism) and I had just read something about how anyone who questions vaccines at all is a fucking moron, I might not be at my most diplomatic, either. And yes, your post can be read that way. If you want to insist her beef with you is because you don’t have kids, you miss a bunch of important things she said. That’s your choice, but I also think it’s your loss.
I am certainly not anti-vaccine but I am downright disturbed at how young some children are being given some of them. Especially Hep-B, which to the best of my understanding is blood or sexually transmitted. I didn’t receive that one until I was 12 years old. Unless the mother is positive for it I don’t see the need for such an early vaccination. I also don’t believe I got my measles until I was four and entering school, that schedule is pretty much the norm here.
No, Phoenix basically said it was good I’m not having kids because I’m too mean/stupid to do it. That’s an insult and uncalled for because there was nothing I did to bring that on. I’m well aware that vaccinations are kind of counterintuitive and unpleasant. I don’t need to have kids to realize—oh my god—they hate going to the doctor and it’s emotionally wrenching for parents to keep going back. I was constantly sick as a child and spent good portions of my life in hospitals and have a loooooong and guilt-laden memory of how much hell I put them through with my constant pleading to be left alone.
But my parents did right by me and made me suffer all those horrible medical treatments and I’m grateful they did, even though it was hard, because I’m a perfectly healthy, asthma-free, downright athletic adult and if they’d given into the urge to lay off the intensive treatment then I wouldn’t be so healthy now.
Amanda, PhoenixRising did not say she found it emotionally wrenching because her kid hates going to the doctor. She said her child almost died. That’s a pretty big difference.
As I’ve said above, I’d be much more trusting of the flu shot concept if it was administered by doctors and not my office. It’s funny, my company doesn’t seem to care whether I get HPV, the measles, or chickenpox. They don’t seem to care whether I could come down with rubella and pass it on to a pregnant woman. But they are positively OBSESSED about the idea that I might need to actually use some of my sick days to recuperate from the flu. So obsessed, in fact, that they would rather buy up all the locally available flu vaccine, thus ensuring that people who actually need flu shots will not have access to them.
seriously amanda, are you really equating the posts here that question the safety of vaccinating infants/newborns with vaccines like Hep B to moms and dads think vaccines are are “unpleasant” and they “makes my baby cry.”
Maybe you can learn me why a newborn infant needs a vaccine for a sexually transmitted disease at birth? And moms and dads should just buck up even though there may be a risk their baby cd die from SIDS. After all we wdn’t want to be labeled idiotic, crazy, cranks by you.
Case in point: the poster who commented that there were 365,000 deaths from measles worldwide in 2005. That’s true, but there’s a reason why infectious disease epidemiologists tend to ignore absolute numbers and think in terms of “number per 100,000 patients with the disease in X geographical/political region“.
Uh, actually my point was that measles is not the same as chicken pox and is a much more serious and deadly disease. I’m pretty sure that even if you look at the number of patients per 100,000, you’re still going to see more deaths in places where measles is uncontrolled than in places where chicken pox is uncontrolled.
Just because measles is not common in the United States anymore does not mean that it is not a serious, deadly, and highly contagious disease, which is what the poster I was responding to was trying to claim.
To be fair, your company is assuming that you were vaccinated against measles and rubella years ago and that you already had chickenpox. HPV vaccine is too new for them to worry about. Flu, on the other hand, is the naturally mutating disease that keeps on giving in different forms year after year after year.
My company is also obsessed with flu shots and keeping us healthy, but that didn’t help much this year since pretty much our entire division has been down for a full week with the flu. I’m in a department of 12 people and four of us have been out with the flu. Both directors of the upcoming project called in sick on the same day just a couple weeks ago and were out for a full week each. So, yeah, this flu is cutting a major swath through the whole damn division.
Ms. Kate:
It’s interesting how we’ve come to similar conclusions despite such differences in perspective. I don’t have any children (and surviving grad school with preschoolers!?! I couldn’t do that *bows*) but I’m watching this unfold from the perspective of a department where everyone works on infectious diseases in Africa.
I think what offends me the most is that the stridently pro-vaccine language has a vaguely neo-colonial vibe for me. Those of us focusing on infectious diseases in developing nations need the intense emotional impact of the magnitude of the suffering to get any support. Our data — or, more accurately, our soundbites — simply don’t apply to industrialized contexts. And well-educated parents know it. But because it legitimately looks like domestic and international epidemiologists form a united front, they write off all of us.
But the problem is that, in epi land, they only teach me how to design and interpret research — not how to effectively convey my interpretation to the public. You seem to be doing better than I am, so I think it may be best for me to go back to lurking and learning from you.
Mnemosyne:
I know. But this argument is eerily parallels’ fundies’ arguments about birth control pills — and the same implications about the severity of the problem. Sure, a woman on BCPs has a 10x risk of dying from a heart attack than a woman who doesn’t. But 10 times an infinitessimally tiny number is still an infinitessimially tiny number.
More importantly, those implications undermine the legitimacy of epidemiologists working in developing nations.
Mnemosyne:
I think you’re conflating incidence and/or prevalence with case fatality rate. The 100,000 only refers to individuals who contracted measles, not the entire population. It doesn’t matter how common the measles is in America — the case fatality rate is still going to be a hell of a lot lower than it is in Africa. It has nothing to do with antibiotics or access to hospitals and everything to do with inadequate water supplies, malnutrition, and pre-existing disease burdens (especially HIV co-morbidity).
History Mom:
I think you’re misunderstanding how anti-vaxers see it. I suspect that the anti-vaccination movement is about holding corporations responsible for their products’ impact on individuals as well as society as a whole. If it were about rugged individualism, you’d probably see a focus on tort claims — and you wouldn’t see activists attempt to increase federal oversight after their claims had been litigated and/or settled.
I’m also not sure that it’s about overmedicalization, if only because I’ve seen so many parents who are against vaccinations and antibiotic use but let their kids take Ritalin. That’s part of the reason why I suspect that it’s more about who has the authority to medicate — and how/whether they live up to their responsibilities. This would also explain the mommier-than-thou phenomenon, but for both sides.
M
Ack, got cut off.
Maybe I’m misinterpreting what you mean by the mommier-than-thou phenomenon?
I know. But this argument is eerily parallels’ fundies’ arguments about birth control pills — and the same implications about the severity of the problem. Sure, a woman on BCPs has a 10x risk of dying from a heart attack than a woman who doesn’t. But 10 times an infinitessimally tiny number is still an infinitessimially tiny number.
In other words, you think that the seriousness of chicken pox and of measles are comparable and we shouldn’t worry if kids in the US start coming down with measles, because getting measles is no worse than getting chicken pox.
You are arguing against a strawman that I never erected. Please stop it.
One thing I found really disturbing when I needed a tetanus shot (after stepping on a rusty nail last year) was that they tried to UPSELL me to the DTaP.
I’ve worked in customer service most of my life, and believe me I know upselling when I see it. Even when I said that I’ve had the DPT shot, they insisted “oh, this one is SOOO much better, we’re recommending everyone get it.”
It also jsut so happened that the DTaP is twice as expensive as tetanus alone.
Ashley, I’m in Illinois, too. I’m sorry you and yours were sick, but what you had wasn’t a serious flu nor was it a dangerous epidemic.
What most people call the “flu” or “stomach flu” is just a random virus. This year, thanks to the CDC misfire, more people actually got influenza which is a disease that will knock you out with a high fever for a week. I bet that’s what you and yours had, and it sucks, but it wasn’t a strain that can kill you.
The scariest thing this year was the virus that hit little kids. My daughter had a temp of between 103 and 105 for 10 days. She went into the dr. 3 times ($40/pop). Her doc told us that she’d seen a lot of it and at first had even admitted a few kids to the hospital, but all the blood work came back clear. It was just a particularly nasty bug that had a fever for a very long time. The follow up appts. were just to make sure nothing else was going on but no antibiotic was going to help. We just kept her on rotation tylenol and ibuprofen.
Then the boy got it and had a fever for 5 days.
It’s still nothing to the 1918 flu. My great-uncle died from that (we’re a long-lived, late-marrying lot). There’s not been a flu outbreak anything like that since, and the more we research it, the more it looks like an avian flu, so the more the MSM panics when there’s an avian flu outbreak in China.
I am not sure what your particular case is Ashley, but booster shots for diptheria and pertussis are recommended, as with tetanus. DTaP (”a” for acellular)has much fewer possible side-effects than the DTP. One article I read said that half of the people over 60 were no longer protected.
This is a potential problem for them and others since they can pass the contagion on. If you hadn’t had a booster for these in the last ten years, it was probably a good thing for you.
When the Soviet Union broke up, vaccination campaigns suffered and cases of diptheria increased dramatically. From 2,000 cases in 1991 it increased to 200,000 in 1998 in the Commonwealth of Independent States.
If you have seen pictures of what this disease can do, you know you don’t want to get it.
Well, I see I am behind in my shots. I better take care of it.
I decided to look up the recommendations at the CDC. You can find them here.
http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/recs/schedules/adult-schedule.htm
Amanda, as someone who has played here in this sandbox for awhile, I gotta say that I have never known you to be anti-kiddo at all. And I have not taken any offense to any of your thoughts posted here regarding autism and the families affected by it, such as my own.
On a few OTHER things, yeah we sometimes disagree and that’s cool…
The opoponax: As I’ve said above, I’d be much more trusting of the flu shot concept if it was administered by doctors and not my office.
Strangely, the exact reasons you give not to trust your office wrt to flu shots are the ones why I trust mine. Because they do not want me to get the flu, and I do not want to get the flu. Our motivations for that are different, but we share this common interest. And it’s less bother to get the shot on company time in the next building than to schedule a doctor’s appointment…
Epidemiology Grad Student: Like I said, this is based on my experience talking with anti-vaxers and the reasons they choose to not vaccinate (as opposed to the vast majority who choose delayed vaccination). The people who do not vaccinate are separate from the anti-vax organizations in that, by and large, they do take this as an individual responsibility and the only changes they agitate for is expanding the exemptions so that they don’t have to vaccinate their children.
There is a strong correlation to the natural living movement, but again it is at an individual not an activist level. Many of these parents are not out there advocating for a change in corporate policies. And overmedicalization is a huge issue. I would say 2/3 to 3/4 of anti-vaxing women are also pro-natural birth, pro-midwife, or pro-home birth. Spend some time on parenting boards and you will see the strong relationship between women who choose less interventive birth and not vaccinating– I didn’t just pull this out of my ass.
On mommier-than-thou: an extension of the patriarchal pitting of women against each other, in this case as mothers. Any mom who makes another mother feel ashamed or lesser for making a different choice (that is not harmful) in parenting. This person tends to regard their parenting style as the ONLY proper way to parent and everyone else is too uneducated to know better. Men also like to play daddier-than-thou: on a hot day an Australian friend was pumping gas with her son strapped in a car seat and all the windows rolled down for air and a man pulled over to tell chastise her because didn’t she know that someone could steal her child? In talking to many of my foreign friends, this habit seems to be particularly bad in Americans. Anti-vax (or hardcore pro-vax) seems to fall easily into this category.
You may disagree with my assessment but that is what I’ve observed, particularly as I run a non-profit group for mothers for over a year.
history_mom, given the topic, I thought for sure the man was going to warn your friend she shouldn’t pump gas with her kid in the car cause he’ll be exposed to benzene and get leukemia. (Probably more likely than being kidnapped, but still.)
My experience of hardcore anti-vaccine folks is the same as yours. (For a little bit I went to a mother’s group organized through the birth center where my midwife practiced, and yes, definitely lots of non-vaccinating parents. Perhaps yet another reason to re-examine the maternal-industrial complex that is birth in this country is that the messed up nature of modern obstetric practice can instill a permanent distrust of modern medicine, even the good parts. Or maybe it’s a chicken/egg thing.) They’re a different sort than the ones who agitated to get the mercury out of vaccines, which I’m glad they did. I’m persuaded the autism-vaccine link just isn’t there, but I’d still rather have my vaccines without mercury, thanks.
I completely agree. I am also interested to see what further studies on replacements for aluminum salts as adjuvants will yield (initial research in Belgium looks promising). I am am pro-vaccine, but my preference would be a delayed schedule (didn’t with my first son– no insurance, so to get the vaxes covered by the state I had to settle for the combo vaccines my pedi offered and couldn’t afford to pay cash for extra visits). In addition, since we know vaccines work, I think it is appropriate to demand research into developing alternatives additives to ingredients we suspect are harmful. There is nothing wrong or anti-science about wanting the safest vaccines possible. I am not a fan of extremism in any guise.
Mnemonsyme:
So you’re telling me that I think measles and chicken pox are equivalent, yet you’re complaining that I’m using you as a strawman? Re-read my post: I am merely pointing out that your argument is flawed for the same reason fundies’ arguments about BCPs are.
history_mom:
Where do you live? I haven’t seen this around here at all. I’ve never heard a parent say something along the lines of “I just don’t want my child to get autism, but I don’t really follow what’s going on in the news.” Instead, I keep hearing “I’ll get my child vaccinated when pharmas start taking responsibility for the long-term safety of their products. The FDA’s totally ineffective, so what else can I do?”
How do you define advocating?
Wow. None of my friends — all of whom refused to vaccinate their children — did this. All went to hospitals and conventional OB/GYNs. But maybe that’s because midwives aren’t a big thing in the urban areas where I went to college and graduate school. I wonder how geography factors into it.
I don’t see this behavior limited to the “hardcore” pro-vax community. It seems like it’s rampant among insecure parents of all stripes.
Uh, yeah, that was my point. You’re putting words in my mouth that I never said and claiming that I was making a point I never tried to make. And you KEEP DOING IT.
Again, if, according to you, my argument that measles is a worse and more deadly disease than chicken pox is the same as a fundamentalist arguing that BCPs cause heart attacks, then that means that you think that measles and chicken pox are equivalent diseases of equivalent seriousness. Either that, or you think that measles is so rare and strange that even if someone in the first world caught it, they have the same chance of dying from it as someone dying from chicken pox. Which, again, means that you think that measles and chicken pox are diseases with the same level of seriousness.
Epidemiology PermaStudent: My experience is not limited to a single geographical area or only my group of friends (who represent a variety of profiles when it comes to birth/vaccination)– welcome to the internet.
It may be that as a relatively new mother I am more likely to come into contact with anti-vaxers in forums where they actually feel free to share their uncensored opinion. I rarely ever post on those forums because I learn far more about the thought processes behind anti-vaccination by observing. You are free to disagree based on your experience, but we will just have to leave it at that.
This is a pretty willful misinterpretation of my position, contradicted by the definition of “mommier-than-thou” that I provided. I said it was one topic that seemed to easily fall prey to the mommier-than-thouers.
I want to give you the benefit of the doubt that you are not willfully misinterpreting me (and Mnemosyne, for that matter) in order to score points. I respectfully request that you make a better attempt at faithfully engaging with those you disagree with by accurately summarizing their arguments.