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In Australia, Immunize Or Lose Benefits
An anonymous reader writes with news of a plan from the Australian government to cut down on the number of kids who aren't vaccinated. The new scheme will deny family tax benefits to parents whose children don't pass immunization checks. Quoting:
"The FTB supplement, worth $726 per child each year, will now only be paid once a child is fully immunized at these checks. Families are already required to have their child fully immunized to receive Child Care Benefit and the Child Care Rebate. Children will also be required for the first time to be vaccinated against meningococcal C, pneumococcal and chicken pox. Children will also be immunized against measles, mumps and rubella earlier, at 18 months instead of the current four years of age."
Rational social interest trumps irrational "self" interest, for once. The USA could learn a thing or two from Australia.
...considering that they have socialized medicine. To libertarians this probably looks like a communist nightmare, I'll admit that to me it only seems OK because I don't believe in the Right to Put Everyone In Danger By Being a Total Moron.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I don't think you understand how immunization is supposed to work.
Things aren't looking good for you sir... their > there
Do you realize intersection between the 'hygiene hypothesis' (exposure to many different infectious vectors helps prime the immune system in useful ways) and immunizations (attempting to decrease the incidence of a few, serious infections) is very, very, very small?
Basically it's a non sequitor.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Actually, it's you who doesn't understand how evolution works... While it's currently antibiotics that are producing the most problems from superbugs, ultimately, anything we do to try to kill off diseases will only cause evolution to produce better bugs.
We are actively changing the fitness function for diseases to include "must be resistant to antibiotics, must be resistant to antivirals, must be able to infect even immunised people, etc", this will inevitably lead to bugs that fulfil these criteria... eventually.
Couple the heavy vaccination schedule with advances in food safety and constant household cleaning; these kids might have little besides flu and rhinovirus to train their immune systems
The vaccine trains the immune system. That it's job.
Tell me why it doesn't make sense to build resistance to diseases like bacterial pneumonia under controlled conditions.
What "government"? Are you even Australian?
At least here in Scandinavia, the government is not the enemy, it represents us and our shared interests. Many Americans seem to think their negative view is the "universal" truth. It is most certainly not.
On the other hand we allow individuals to choose what immunizations they want their children to get. It just happens that most people actually trust our government, universal health care system and science; the majority of people choose to get all immunizations offered.
We are actively changing the fitness function for diseases to include "must be resistant to antibiotics, must be resistant to antivirals, must be able to infect even immunised people, etc", this will inevitably lead to bugs that fulfil these criteria... eventually.
By this logic, we should be expecting bullet-proof cattle and thresher-proof wheat any day now, not to mention hook-resistant fish and armored potatoes...
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
which doesn't necessarily make them all that important. A virus/bacteria/etc that is resistant to all of those things but only gives you a runny nose for 2 days isn't really a big problem.
And of course we know that doing nothing killed people. A lot of them. For centuries. Or have we all forgotten that infant mortality rates used to be over 10%, and deaths by what are now preventable diseases killed millions at a young age?
Ok, so maybe we create diseases that are immune to whatever we're doing, that's why we keep doing drug research. It might be a cat and mouse game, but I prefer being on the side of people who have very fortunately lived through all of these things. And I'm sure so do you, even if you don't realize it.
At the end of the day the parent that doesn't vaccinate has made a bad choice for their child and their child suffers because of it.
Not necessarily. If vaccination rates are low then it is probably in everyone's self-interest to be vaccinated. If rates are high then the risk of infection should go down, in which case the risk of vaccination (which is unlikely to be zero) may become greater at some point on the curve.
You can argue that this is a selfish choice, and that the risk of vaccination has been greatly exaggerated by some commentators, but let's not try to pretend that there is only one rational outcome here.
By this logic, we should be expecting bullet-proof cattle and thresher-proof wheat any day now, not to mention hook-resistant fish and armored potatoes...
Cattle, wheat and potatoes are selected for being easily harvestable, among other things. Fish, now, well that there could be the beginning of a very nice disaster movie plot! :D
sigs are hazardous to your health
that which puts me and my children in danger- not getting vaccinated, is not a natural freedom.
The problem with the definition of freedom, as defined by teenagers (not chronological teenagers, but psychological teenagers) is that it does not take into account how some "freedoms" naturally and automatically impinge on the freedoms of others.
For example: your freedom to play your music as loud as you want, my freedom to get a good night's sleep. Your freedom to consume nicotine, my freedom to breathe clean air when I walk down the sidewalk. You freedom to talk on your cellphone, my freedom to enjoy a movie. Etc.
If you claim as a right or freedom that which impinges on someone else's rights or freedoms, without even considering the possibility, you aren't selfish. You're just stupid: you don't know what freedom really is. To you, it is "let me do whatever I want without consideration of effects or consequences." That is "freedom" as defined by an ignorant teenager (again, not a chronological teenager, a psychological one, who could be of any age), and has absolutely nothing to do with the real fight for freedom in this world by real freedom fighters, who are often quoted by people who don't even know what freedom really is.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Sure... but evolution takes longer in species that reproduce at much lower rates and exist in much smaller numbers.
Bachmann certainly isn't poor.
But she's definitely very willing to lie; and possible dumber than a box of rocks as well.
Actually, there is only one rational outcome here. And the basis for that is in your previous statement.
Which means that in order for child A to avoid the vaccination "safely", someone must guarantee that children B - Z are vaccinated.
While it may be a correct mathematical statement reflecting the spread of infection, it is not a "rational" approach to immunization. If everyone followed that, then none of the children would be immunized. If 50% of the population followed that then the diseases would still be a problem. And so forth.
if you want the free benefits from society then you have to live up to expectations. It's your choice as to immunisation or not, but you are making a decision for your child, not for yourself, and so it is reasonable to want to protect your child from potentially fatal diseases, and teach them to swim, and to look before crossing the road. As many of these diseases can be passed on to others, it's also a community issue.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
If she didn't already go around foaming at the mouth, this would certainly light her off. I've got to check on Peter Bowditch [ratbags.com] more often; he's going to have a blast covering this.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Do you realize intersection between the 'hygiene hypothesis' (exposure to many different infectious vectors helps prime the immune system in useful ways) and immunizations (attempting to decrease the incidence of a few, serious infections) is very, very, very small?
Even if I accept your certain statement, with absolutely no evidence behind it, you've missed the point. You either didn't read my entire post or you didn't read the article and look into which vaccines the Australians are giving. My point is that Australia doesn't appear to be "decreasing the incidence of a few, serious infections"; they seem to be vaccinating against every single thing they possibly can. If a vaccine exists and there's more than a one in a hundred thousand chance of a child getting the disease, they'll give the vaccine.
I understand that slashdot is flat-out rabid in their favor of vaccines, but just because vaccines don't cause autism or any other direct health concern doesn't mean it's healthy from an evolutionary standpoint to vaccinate every single child against every single infinitesimal threat.
1. No vaccine is 100% effective. You can be immunized and still get sick. Less likely, and it's likely to be milder, but it could still be fatal.
2. Not being immunized raises the chance you will get sick, and expose those around you to the disease.
For many of these major diseases, if less than a certain percentage of the population gets immunized, the disease still runs fairly rampant through the population - including the immunized population. You need basically everybody to be immunized so that when the disease strikes one person, it doesn't have any convenient vectors to other people, and stays contained.
Besides, we have a certain hesitancy to allow survival of the fittest to take it's course where humans are concerned. Partly out of fellow-feeling, and partly because we've found that 'fittest' can have multiple meanings, and that someone who can barely talk and can't get out of their wheelchair can still give humanity as a whole great value in understanding the how the universe works. (Through their own work.)
'Sensible' is a curse word.
The studies done so far don't show any correlation between vaccination and the hygiene effect.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2003/03/030304072832.htm
Immunization doesn't take for everyone. Immunizations can't be used on everyone due to things like allergies. Immunization can wear off and become ineffective over time, or in between booster shots. When everyone is vaccinated according to schedule, you only have a small percentage of the population that is at risk to those diseases. Since there are only a couple percent that will become infected when exposed, the likelihood of the virus being passed between two of these people is very low. It is a condition called "herd immunity" that makes unchecked spread of the virus unlikely.
When people are willingly forgoing vaccinations, you aren't just putting yourself at risk, you are dropping the total percent of the population that is at risk. As that number drops further and further, the easier it is for the virus to spread into an outbreak. The more a virus spreads, the higher likelihood it will have a chance to mutate into a form the existing vaccine does not protect against. In other words, when they chose not to get vaccinated, they are putting all the rest of us at risk out of their own stupidity.
If millions of years of mammalian immune systems getting infected haven't done it yet, a few decades of a few billion humans reducing the number of pathogens which are exposed to them isn't going to.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Fish are being influenced by selective pressure from fishing... it's pushing them to spawn younger, grow faster and die sooner. Not much can be done evolutionwise to become net-resistant, so they are evolving to breed faster.
Except it doesn't. The only viruses that successfully 'get around' immunization are the ones that do it naturally(See Influenza), because that's the way they are, not as some defense mechanism.
We are seeing anti-biotic resistant bacteria because anti-biotics dont kill all the bacteria, some survive the treatment, and very occasionally then take hold elsewhere to become resistant strains.
We don't see this problem in our immunological response, because our white cells don't exactly leave bacteria and viruses half dead, or survivors for that matter. Once those antibodies attach, your done. No passing go, no collecting 200$, no passing on your genes so that the next generation can evolve to fight back. That white cell there is going to annihilate you.
It only cuts off benefits for not getting it. If you don't need the benefits, then you effectively are not required to get immunization.
The basic message is "Poor people need to be immunized, not rich people."
Things aren't looking good for you, sir...
"Libertarians, who, let's face it, are either morons or sociopaths"
Right, because the government's will trumps any sort of idea that you can make choices for you or your children.
Seriously fuck you just because you claim anybody who disagrees with your viewpoint is a moron or a sociopath.
I won't call you names, but you're exactly the kind of person who should never be in charge of anything for any reason.
I see there are already five identical replies, so I'll pick yours at random to answer.
I'm not stupid; I understand that vaccines train the immune system. My point is that the kind of 'training' vaccines introduce is military in style: a strict vaccination schedule trains every single immune system on the same precise schedule, with identical doses of genetically identical antigens.
Training every single person against precisely the same threats in precisely the same way will work fine against the known threats, but we don't know what it does against the unknown threats. I'm not saying immune systems will be worse against unknown threats; I don't know. It may be a non-issue. It may also be that, just like monoculture in crops (although this is a much lesser degree; we're hardly producing immunological clones), giving everyone so much of the same training does makes us more vulnerable to various unknown threats in the long run. We may be training ourselves into greater susceptibility for a disease that doesn't even exist yet, one which preys precisely upon our highly similar resistances to so many other diseases. The massive variability of the human immune system is its greatest strength; anything that could train out some of that variability concerns me. It's a good question, and not one to be immediately dismissed as 'flamebait'.
I'm trying to raise a long-term, evolutionary question about the usefulness of vaccines. When I speak to a possible lack of 'training', I mean the kind of training that encourages diversity in our immunological gene pool rather than potentially discouraging it.
He was actually talking about 100 years ago, not 2000. In 1911, what could possibly still be called "modern times," the infant mortality rate was about 10%, and the maternal mortality rate was about 1% (Around 9 in 1000 births killed the mother).
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
Not necessarily. For example smallpox was completely eradicated through vaccination, and polio is well on it's way out.
First: You are mixing up bacteria and viruses. Bacteria evolve resistance to antibiotics. Viruses do not, because they do not react to antibiotics in the first place.
Second: Evolution in biology does not work like in poorly researched science fiction. While you can throw any factor you want into a fitness function, there are limits on what can be replicated in a cell. The viral capsid has to consist of protein and be of a certain shape, and the immune system can be trained to recognize it.
Third: Even if it worked, you're running the small risk of the spontaneous appearance of a disease that could overcome vaccinations and infect everyone, as opposed to not vaccinating and definitely allowing ordinary diseases to infect everyone. Unlike the antibiotic, the vaccine is preventive, long-term and specific to a disease. The danger of antibiotic abuse (ie. irregular or uncompleted treatments, or regular small doses) is that it exposes bacteria just enough to allow resistance to evolve, rather than killing off the infection completely. Vaccination doesn't do that because the immune system will kill the infection before it can take hold.
Since the development of civilization some 5000 years ago there hasn't been an evolutionary process for homo sapiens. The fact that man has pretty much controlled his environment since then has put an end to normal selection processes, as is evidenced by the explosion in population levels.
I don't think you understand evolution in a properly broad sense.
Evolution isn't only about selection pressure, for one thing. For every gene that becomes common because everyone without it died or didn't fuck enough (or the converse), there's another one that became common out of sheer randomness. Neutral drift, duplication events, etc. cause a lot of evolution, and occasionally lead to traits with massive selection coefficients, without those processes themselves or their intermediary products ever being subject to significant selection pressure.
Mankind is at least as susceptible to evolution as we ever were; I'd argue we're actually the most susceptible species that's ever existed. We've managed many selection pressures in ways no other present species can even emulate; that is true. We've also created unique, sapien-exclusive selection pressures upon ourselves, and greatly amplified other ordinary selection pressures, upon ourselves and the planet as a whole.
You're correct that some of our selection pressures are no longer 'normal'; you're completely wrong to suppose that we're no longer subject to evolution.
No such thing as vaccine resistant. The vaccine actually attacks the body stimulating it to produce anti-bodies, you might argue that this produces anti-body resistant bacteria but that has always been the case, if a bacteria could attack faster than the body reacted it survived, also if the body could not produce effective anti-bodies the bacteria lived. This has been going on since bacteria attacked other living things, not just since humans were around. If the anti-body to bacteria battle could produce a super-germ we would have seen one by now.
Is that if you have a medical exception, or conscientious objector that needs a Dr to sign, you will still get your benefits.
From:
http://immunise.health.gov.au/internet/immunise/publishing.nsf/Content/faq-related-payments#immunised
"What exemptions will be available for the new immunisation conditions linked to the Family Tax Benefit Part A supplement?
While the Government considers that immunisation is an important health measure for children and families, existing exemptions will continue to be available.
A child may have a temporary or permanent exemption if a recognised immunisation provider determines that receiving the vaccine is medically contraindicated. A child may also receive an exemption from the immunisation requirements if a recognised immunisation provider indicates that the parent has a conscientious objection to immunising their child.
These exemptions will also continue for Child Care Benefit. "
They also do not mention any additional ingredients of these vaccines. But that is another story.
-- "Perceptions create reality. By changing your perceptions you change your reality."
What happens here is antiviral, antibiotic, or vaccination doesn't kill off 100% of the virus. Some cells tend to survive. If some of the cells are resistant to the 'cure', then the survivors tend to be those particular cells that live to continue manufacturing virions that are less susceptible to the vaccine.
You may not have a vaccine-resistant virus today, but vaccination creates selective pressures that tend to make ones that are vaccine-resistant survive and reproduce more.... resulting that in the future newer viruses that occur are more likely to resemble the more vaccine-resistant ones, and eventually, as the trend repeats with enough iterations, the resistance becomes stronger and stronger......
That is not how vaccines work. Vaccines don't kill anything. They train your body to recognize and respond effectively to the infection.
Some very basic info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccine
"You want to know how to help your kids? Leave them the fuck alone." -George Carlin
You see those flu vaccines, how they are good for a couple different strains, and there are tons of others they don't protect against? Viruses mutate, and do so very rapidly. Give them something to survive in, and eventually they will mutate into something that no longer resembles the vaccine sufficiently closely for the vaccine to be effective. At such time, a new one must be developed.
If you inoculate the entire population, or a sufficiently large percentage, you effectively eradicate the virus. If instead, you let those periodic outbreaks flush though the unvaccinated, your probability of a mutation continues to grow.
I live in France, where you can't get kids into kindergarten or school without vaccination certificates. And they cut child benefit too. The result is a very high vaccination rate, and that protects those who cannot be vaccinated such as very young children.
Virtually serving coffee
The poor who don't want to immunize will be forced to due to financial considerations.
The rich who don't want to immunize simply won't.
This doesn't target those who already believe immunization is a smart move, because obviously they will already immunize. This only affects those who don't want to, and among them, it will only affect the poor.
The rich get to do what they want, the poor have to do what they're told.
When you want society to care for you, you have to let society care for you. If you reject society's care, expect to get none. Could it be any simpler?
I think his point was that your idea was backwards. If you get attenuated vaccines (which I assume most of these are), you're effectively exposing yourself to several extra things - not less things. If the idea was priming immune systems through exposure, then attenuated vaccines would almost certainly be a positive. If these vaccines didn't do that, then they wouldn't work. And they do.
healthy from an evolutionary standpoint
I assume you're not suggesting that we should let people die (or be sterilized, as by mumps) by exposure to serious illness - thus to improve humans through evolutionary processes? I'm guessing you mean (and are saying in a roundabout way) something like "humans evolved with viruses around, so it's natural for people to get sick sometimes and something, something" (ie. you're making a general health argument, and you're couching it on some vague "evolutionary status quo" thing).
But, again, I'd say exactly the opposite: for most of primate history, we didn't have nearly the varied social contact and mobility that humans have now. All the mechanics of epidemiology have changed in a nano-second of evolutionary time. If we think of "priming the pump through exposure to a variety of viruses", I'd say that - vaccinations and hygiene or not - we are exposed to way more different strains than our ancestors would have been (because our social groups are vastly larger, more interconnected, and varied).
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
You do realize that first the taxes are taken from the family, the only question is how much of THIER OWN MONEY the government decides to hand back...
I'm not sure what your point is?
Those same taxes are also taken from families with no children, and with grown up children, and whose children have died due to not being immunized too....
Everyone pays taxes, that's how government is paid for. Deal with it. Your point is at most a distraction from any rational discussion.
You raise a good point actually.
Bacteria have to actually survive to pass on their genes.
I think the problem is that antibiotics, with their often one track chemical minds, don't do a thorough job.
But speaking of cattle, I bet spiking their feed with antibiotics doesn't help us humans much.
I'm not stupid; I understand that vaccines train the immune system. My point is that the kind of 'training' vaccines introduce is military in style: a strict vaccination schedule trains every single immune system on the same precise schedule, with identical doses of genetically identical antigens.
You're taking that analogy too far. There are a couple of things that you're getting wrong.
1. Benefits conferred by vaccination are not inherited, therefore your immune system is not made less sophisticated because of vaccination.
2. Adaptive immunity factors (i.e. receptors) are more or less randomly generated and "trained" by the body. Vaccines do not change that. (see Somatic Hypermutation.)
Vaccination gives your body a head-up on diseases. It gives your body an opportunity to develop adaptive immunity toward the disease in question. It does NOT affect how the immune system fundamentally works.
Adaptive Immune System is a fascinating part of biology. You should really spend some time understanding it.
Einmal ist Keinmal. What happens but once might as well not have happened at all.
anti-bacterial hand gel. That is one of the worst ideas (at a consumer level) ever. Anything it doesnt kill is now immune to the damn gel and has no competition in its enviornment
I'm presuming you are referring to triclosan containing soaps, not hand sanitizer gels. The latter typically contain 60-70% alcohol, and you're not going to be developing resistance to that.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
Polio was well on its way out ... now it is on it's way back in due to conspiracy theories - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poliomyelitis#Eradication
Yeah, this will only affect the poor. So what? Make another law, like requiring these immunizations to collect mortgage tax deductions (if that exists in Australia), or some other law that affects more people.
The rich will immunize because its a smart move. The poor will immunize because its a smart move.
Interestingly, here in Canada, the 'poor' actually have a higher immunization rate for their children than the rich, because the poor trust their doctors and don't have the time/energy/wherewithall to spend their time with 'herbalists' and other rubbish. A note comes from school saying 'we're immunizing against rubella tomorrow' and the poor sign the permission slip because to them it sounds like a good idea. And they're right.
You don't get it. Society believes, based on evidence, that the few dipshits that don't immunize are putting others at risk. They incentivise the smart choice, in a way of saying "those who will take measures to keep us all safer get a tax break". This is to drive all people to make the smart choice....
I bet you would be even more upset if the incentive was percentage of income based, which *would* equally motivate the rich to immunize... and because they would have breaks in the hundreds of thousands while the poor only get hundreds.
So should the break be percentage based? It would be proportional, and equally incentivising....
Eugenics? Selective breeding of humans? wtf?
You must be part of the "alternative knowledge system", where facts are whatever confirms your paranoia.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
One of the known mechanisms by which pathogenic bacteria get resistance to antibiotics is by horizontal gene transfer from our own gut flora. Gut flora becomes resistant to antibiotics because the levels in our gastrointestinal tract is lower than in our bloodstream. Viruses and bacteriophages (which infect bacteria) then transfer plasmids between different species.
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1. And those "mainstream numbers" only remain relevant as long as vaccination rates remain high.
2. Measles is still a relevant disease. There were 164,000 measles deaths in 2008 and at least 10x that number of infections.
3. Which STD do you refer to? If it's HPV, that's not a infant vaccine, it's not given until age 9 or so.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
You are remarkably misinformed. There are hundreds of vaccinations we don't give children in Australia.
These are the typical ten that are given to infants: diptheria, tetanus, pertussis, hepatitis b, polio, hib, pneumococcal, measles, mumps, rubella (most in combination to reduce the number of injections required).
They are all freely available. For people who have specific objections to vaccines, you can fill in a form and still gain the usual benefits and bonuses; this is just a hurdle so that vaccination becomes the default position. Vaccinations are free of charge, so most people take advantage of that.
And even if the hygiene hypothesis relied upon these few diseases (rather than the myriad parasites and bacteria that can be found in the average soil sample or unwashed food), it would hardly make sense to let polio run through the community.
In any society, certain behaviors must be mandated in order for that society to function, let alone thrive. These can be narrowly-tailored; in the US, the Supreme Court has been delivering largely narrowly-tailored opinions for the last decade, realizing that sweeping generalizations can often do enough harm to society so as to outweigh the good coming from rectifying the immediate issue before the Court. It is possible to back mandated vaccinations without backing pervasive surveillance. It is a narrowly-tailored exception to not wanting the government to track all of my activities based on the overall benefit that comes from almost everyone being immunized. In addition, immunization provides a relatively rapid and verifiable outcome, something widespread surveillance will likely not do (at least in part because many of the actions undertaken by surveillance units will never be publicly revealed).
On a side note, becoming anti-vaccination simply to make a political point is an unthinking, knee-jerk reaction to someone telling you what to do. If you're taking the view for a religious reason, that's one thing. But to take a view just to stick it to the man means that you're leaving your reasoning at the door and allowing emotion to make up your mind. I understand your questions and skepticism, but please do put some rational thought into the decision.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
Too many people don't understand how antibiotic resistance works: there's no problem with using antibiotics if you use them as a full-course and thoroughly eradicate an infection. However, since you can't always do this, every time we use them (and in the idiotic ways they've been used previously) what we've done is not wipe-out whole infections, but only kill off say, 99% of them, leaving a harbor of 1%.
The 1% that survive, then end up restarting the infection - but now, it's the 1% that were, for whatever reason ever so slightly more resistant to the antibiotic used then the entire population. They don't have to be completely resistant - just a little. But now, the next time you use the antibiotics it's just that little bit slower to kill off the population - and if you again leave a harbor, well, now you've just selected for even more resistance.
Vaccines are very different, because the immune system itself is designed to be able to vary it's response to target mutants. The immune system has a built in evolutionary system to permute through antibody combinations, so it's very good at wiping out not just the things it's seen, but any subtle variants it hasn't. Only a very few organisms can elude the immune system, and they do so by expressing a similar behavior - having a library of proteins they can rapidly shuffle.
The whole point of a vaccine is that since the immune system is initially primed to the disease, it wipes out most of it before an infection can be established, and natural immunity then quickly destroys variants. No resistance can be formed, because the organism never gets a chance to create off-spring with mutations before the immune system has annihilated it from the body.
Not a failure of vaccines, but a failure due to ignorance and superstition.
Once those antibodies attach, your done. No passing go, no collecting 200$, no passing on your genes so that the next generation can evolve to fight back.
Once they attach – the next generation evolves from the few that survive because the antibodies didn't attach ;)
No they don't.
Look, your immune system is keyed to murder every non-self thing in your body. It's why implants and organ transplants are so hard to do.
Infections depend on overwhelming the immune system - infecting enough cells that by the time the immune response is mounted (i.e. by the time an antibody which can attach to the pathogen is generated via our natural mechanism for permutating them) that there is an enormous number of virus or bacteria to deal with (i.e. you're sick). Usually, the immune system wins under these conditions (if it doesn't you die and game over).
Vaccination shortcuts the process - exposes the immune system to the pathogen so that the antibody type needed is already known and remembered (i.e. some base amount of it is always in your blood). When the first pathogen hits, an antibody finds it, binds to it, and the immune system almost immediately produces a huge amount of the exact right antibody - the infection never takes hold.
But that isn't all that happens: because the infection can't take hold, the infection never gets a chance to mutate from reproducing. And any mutations present are unlikely to be dramatic - that is to say, while surviving 1% longer might be the start of an evolutionary path way to resisting the antibodies (say, taking slightly longer to bind, or producing a weaker binding) - if that mutation never gets a chance to become an established infection then it simply doesn't matter - it's just as dead. And because the immune system is also permutating around the core motif, any minor variation is incredibly likely to be just as easily destroyed.
Most viruses and bacteria simply can't rapidly change their structure - there's a big energy cost to it, or it's too great an evolutionary gap to jump (i.e. there's no pathway which lets them have 100% resistance immediately - which means that, without becoming established infections, they might as well be completely non-resistant).
This is so much garbage. Evolution doesn't know what species are. Evolution cares for no-one. Evolution acts on genes eliminating those that find themselves in a bad situation and, on average, favouring those that in some way act to improve their own survival.
If an individual member of a species finds a way of dominating other members of that species, that individual will be favoured in the short term even if, in that way of domination involves destroying the species environment. Long term, the entire species may be wiped out (this is extremely common; "evolution" is not worried by this at all), or the other members of the species may evolve a way of countering that individual to ensure their own survival, but that is never a sure thing.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
"Not much can be done evolutionwise to become net-resistant,"
Actually there is! Fish can get smaller to swim through the gaps in the net.
My point is that even if you 'vaccinate against every single thing you can' it's only perhaps a dozen organisms. The human body is exposed to hundreds, if not thousands, if not millions of organisms on a regular basis. To suggest that the specific immune responses occurring after a vaccination have much of an impact with the enormous numbers of responses an intact immune system gets exposed to on a regular basis and that those limited specific exposures are somehow deleterious strikes me as extremely implausible.
So, if you have some research that actually speaks to that, I would be obliged.
But your last statement
I understand that slashdot is flat-out rabid in their favor of vaccines, but just because vaccines don't cause autism or any other direct health concern doesn't mean it's healthy from an evolutionary standpoint to vaccinate every single child against every single infinitesimal threat.
really makes it seem that you don't know what you're talking about. A dozen vaccines is not "every single infinitesimal threat" by a long shot.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!