prisoner of the flesh's dilemma

[vito_excalibur]

So jedusor posted about vaccinations and I was thinking about them.

Okay, let's take a look at just one set. Let's look at the MMR vaccine. That's measles, mumps, and rubella.

If you give your kid the MMR vaccine, they have less than a one in a million chance of getting seriously ill or dying (encephalitis). Call it one in a million.

If your kid gets

Comments

[mamagotcha]

I want to point out is that you're comparing ONLY the death rate of the vaccine to the damage rate of the diseases. You might want to look at death AND damage of vaccine vs. death AND damage rate of diseases. Unfortunately, there's no way to really study the long-term effects of vaccine damage, when there are so many other factors to take into account

[apostle_of_eris]

That's an area where I'd made predictions long ago, but was a little off.
The explosion of industrial chemistry after World War II exposed children since to minute amounts of thousands or tens of thousands of compounds which never existed before.
My guess was that the "Baby Boomers" would be the "cancer cohort". Hasn't really happened. But the remarkable rise in immune system dysfunction looks like the flip side I missed.

[rubrick]

There's no way to rule out cumulative vaccine damage to the immune system as a legitimate catalyst when you have onset of these things months or years after the needle.

That seems on the face of it to be false. It would be true if the vaccination rate in the population was 100%, but the whole reason for this discussion is that it isn't. A large-scale study comparing the incidence of such problems in vaccinated vs. unvaccinated individuals is quite feasible. Not easy, of course, but that's exactly what epidemiologists do.

Some might argue that a higher rate of all those problems/deaths are well worth the lowered rate of death/damage from the diseases the vaccines were meant to avoid. I do not agree.

There's a big qualitative difference between the two sides of this equation- the prevented deaths and damage from the vaccines are an extremely well-documented fact, whereas the alleged problems caused by them are at this point entirely speculative.

[mamagotcha]

A large-scale study comparing the incidence of such problems in vaccinated vs. unvaccinated individuals is quite feasible.

You would think! It hasn't happened yet (except for small private studies like this). However, I've read that it's being proposed and supported now, at the federal level.

...the prevented deaths and damage from the vaccines are an extremely well-documented fact...

When I see charts like the following, I have to wonder whether that's true:

Polio rates before and after introduction of vaccines
Pertussis rates before and after introduction of vaccines
Measles rates before and after introduction of vaccines

If you reset the starting point for your graph, like this one for polio, you can make it look like the vaccines were the magic bullet.

I don't know the source for those graphs, though... but that's what came up when I googled disease rates before and after vaccine introduction.

[reesei]

Another problem is that refusal to vaccinate tends to cluster in certain economic/social groups. Herd immunity is local, not whole-population-based. What matters is how many of your classmates have been vaccinated, not how many kids in the country as a whole are vaccinated.

[vito_excalibur]

I know. I find it hilarious that being rich, liberal and white is a danger in this case.

[abyssinia4077]

I...got linked from somewhere.

And, yep. The town I'm currently living in is predominately white, upper middle class, and very liberal and, well, full of wannabe new-age hippies. And there's a disturbingly high number of parents who refuse to vaccinate their kids.

Apparently the whooping cough that went around the elementary schools last spring was pretty nasty.

[reesei]

Anytime you're dealing with a group care situation where your kid is going to be exposed to other kids (and therefore all the other kids _those_ kids have been exposed to), the risk goes up. If you're home-caring, and your kid doesn't go out to play much, then maybe you can put some of these things off until school age without having as large a risk of exposure - but eventually your kid is going to have to encounter the big wide world.

My great-great grandmother was the only one of 16 siblings who survived a cholera epidemic, according to family legend. My mom has told me stories of growing up before the polio vaccine. We don't live in an era where we have to worry about these things, and I'm happy to help contribute to herd immunity in order to avoid any chance of reverting to it.

[vito_excalibur]

Thanks! I have good friends. :)

[hrafn]

Not that I go around reading pro/anti-vaccination arguments often, or have a handy stash of pro-vaccination arguments (that being the camp I fall in), but I really like the way you laid out the risks here. The Wired article - oh, humanity :(

(I think I originally found your LJ via some widely-linked rant ages ago, and periodically I wander over again.)