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Doctors "Fire" Vaccine Refusers
phantomfive writes "In a study of Connecticut pediatricians published last year, some 30% of 133 doctors said they had asked a family to leave their practice for vaccine refusal. Pediatricians are getting tired of families avoiding vaccines, which puts their children at higher risk of disease. From the article: 'Pediatricians fed up with parents who refuse to vaccinate their children out of concern it can cause autism or other problems increasingly are "firing" such families from their practices, raising questions about a doctor's responsibility to these patients.
Medical associations don't recommend such patient bans, but the practice appears to be growing, according to vaccine researchers.'"
Goodbye useless vaccines.
should - maroon tin-foil parents are going to spread disease unless they get their foul, miscreant spam vaccinated
Don't like my medical advice? Fine, go somewhere else. Seems perfectly reasonable and rational. If I were these doctors, I wouldn't want to feel responsible for the health of a child whose parents were demonstrably not interested in keeping their child healthy.
Yes,
It is about time the doctors start to throwing the 'hippies' and mercola readers out.
If you want to go alternative DEAL with that. But you want to be a freeloader, and after complain about 'conspiracies' and demand health care.
NO.
If you can't have a scientific discussion with your doctor please do not breed
If some anti-vax moron doesn't want to use the help provided by the doctor, then the doctor doesn't need to keep them cluttering up his clinic.
That's his right.
It's also the right of the anti-vax moron to die faster, so hopefully they'll be weeded out in short order and we can get back to living better with medicine.
No. Really. You anti-vax'rs are morons. Self-indulgent, blinded, murderous morons.
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...quite honestly, those doctors are doing it right.
PROFIT!
I don't blame them. The doctors also have to worry about other patients who come into their clinics. I suggest buying stock in child-sized coffin making companies so at least sensible people can make some cash off of these idiots and their derp.
There is no reason for a doctor to spend their time on a patient who doesn't listen. If they dont trust the medical field thats fine, but why then go to a professional who tells you the opposite of what you want to hear.
It sounds to me like they're taking the long view and saving themselves the time, effort, and frustration these families will cost them over the years as their beliefs and other habits catch up with them.
If they're making an offer that cannot be refused without an adverse threat, such as this one, it's not voluntary. Not only has the doctor done harm by removing them from their practice, they are in a worse situation where the terminated party has fewer and lower quality options (if any).
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
What about the doctor's responsibility for the rest of his patients who aren't cheerleading the cause of dead children?
Believe it or not, most doctors actually care about keeping people healthy. They're not just in it for the money.
Besides, does any doctor really want kids with polio, smallpox, etc. running around their office -- potentially getting other patients sick?
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
I'm always torn on this kind of stuff.
On one hand, I think parents should be able to chose what is best for their children. Doctors and the medical community have been wrong before, and while I doubt that is the case here, I don't think parents should be forced to submit to whatever the doctor says.
On the other hand, parents are making decisions which are very likely not in their childs best interest, which isn't fair to the kid (and arguably, not fair to other kids/people/society in general in this case).
I'm not a parent or a doctor, so at least my opinion on this is largely irrelevant.
So if I think that 27+ vaccines in the first 18 months of life are just a tad excessive, I'm a knuckle-dragging imbecile? If I raise the point that just maybe many of these doctors are in the pockets of the companies who make all these vaccines, then I'm tin-foil-hatted nut?
It's just the most critical period of mental development in the entire life of a human...I definitely think we should introduce as many foreign agents as we can, just to make sure.
I think it's more of a Doctor desire to not work with idiots, and to instead save room in the schedule for the parents actually concerned with their kids' health.
There are free vaccine clinics EVERYWHERE due to the fact that there are WAY more than enough vaccines to go around. My family has even used them a number of times. I'm sure the doctors are not concerned with the $10-15 per shot they would get since there are easy ways to vaccinate your kids and not have to pay it anyway.
Its not different than a tech support company refusing data protection to customers not using anti virus
Doctors aren't always right (like anybody in any profession), but this isn't about the doctors themselves. It's about the science.
And the scientific evidence has shown time and time again that there is no link between vaccinations and autism, and that the benefits of eradicating these types of diseases far outweigh the potential mild side effects of taking them.
As such, I have no problem with the idea of doctors who practice said science turning away patients who want to be in denial about it.
No Shirt, No Shoes, No Vaccine: No Service. Go waste some other doctor's time. It's hard enough for doctors to make a living with Medicare cutbacks, insurance cuts, etc.
They can take my LifeAlert pendant when they pry it from my cold dead fingers.
I can see this spreading to people who don't take their pills, don't follow instructions to drop weight and/or exercise, etc.
it's understandable i think. I'm sure they are a lot of new patients who would love to get on a doctor's schedule sooner than later. And a few doctor friends of mind complain about the waste of time and energy on patients (especially those who are obese or have type 2) who just refuse to do anything to better themselves.
Managing your health requires that you actively participate in bettering yourself. I don't care if you are working with an MD, Chiro, new age healer, etc. If you won't do anything to take care of yourself why should you expect people to waste their time on you?
I think vaccine deniers are dangerous fools, and I wish I were religious if only for the comfort of believing in a Hell waiting to accept "Dr." Wakefield.
But before we jump on this particular bandwagon, perhaps we ought to ask:
Can a doctor "fire" a patient for continuing to smoke?
For continuing to drink? How are we defining "drink?"
For continuing to overeat?
For continuing to eat lots of red meat? Fried food? Salt?
For not being on the caveman diet?
I'm a little disturbed by the reaction above. A more nuanced reason to ban unvaccinated people would be that they endanger every other patient with a weakened immune system in the waiting room. I don't see why a medical association would recommend against a patient ban for this reason.
There are more then a few doctors out there with struggling practices. I suspect you could very easily make yourself a pretty successful business out of simply not firing the patient.
This is effective at getting patients you don't like to go away and not be a part of your practice. I don't know if it will accomplish anything else.
I can certainly empathize with disliking a customer/client and firing them. I've fired a few clients in my time. Mostly for attitude issues. But I've never thought that firing them changed that person. I just thought they'd go on to the next person and act the same way. And eventually, someone would accept it or not care or whatever.
I also find it highly improbable that they won't find a doctor to serve them. Possibly they'll get a lower quality doctor. Anything is possible.
Anyway, the whole thing is unfortunate.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Perhaps, they think this will help convince the family that the vaccines really are important. They're choosing to make this choice in face of losing long-term profits. That points to a deliberate ethical decision, and not grubbing after a $40 fee.
It's more along the lines of a doctor NOT wanting to be blamed for a more serious illness down the road that could have been easily prevented by one of these "useless vaccines." In such a litigious society, it's called "covering one's ass."
"Oh, little Jimmy got sick, even though we were religiously going to the doctor? IT'S HIS FAULT! SUE! SUE! SUE! SUE!
i think that just about every medical student knows EXACTLY what that means.
If a Doctor can't do his best to serve a patient then he should not do anything for that patient (of course he should also refer the patient to some other Doctor).
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If pharmacists are allowed to refuse to dispense birth control based on their convictions, and churches can refuse to cover it due to their convictions, doctors should be allowed to refuse to treat idiots based on their convictions. Welcome to the free market, bitches.
Doctors can fire any nonemergent patients any time they want, provided they care for the patient for next 30 days, and send the patients' next doctor the medical documentation they have. They don't need to even provide a reason.
The only reasons that aren't allowed are Title X type things, no racism, sexism, handicappedism, and so on... Not following the doctor's medical advice is a very acceptable reason.
It has been said, that once upon a time in China, you paid the doctor when he kept you healthy, not when you fell ill.
It might make sense to expel people from your practice in that setting.
Hey don't blame me, IANAB
What if I refuse just this one vaccine? http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-16109424
That way, when the kiddo becomes deathly ill from some disease they weren't vaccinated against, their parents will have no where to turn for help, what with being blackballed by the pediatrician.
What ever happened to "First Do No Harm?"
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
If murder was legal, I'd go on a fucking killing spree to help rid the world of anti-vaccination cretin.
Not that I agree with these people, but how is their poor, unhealthy life choice any different from that of a smoker, or a chronic fast food eater? Both of those will lead to health complications in the future.
And if they can refuse these people, then where's the cut-off? Someone eating boxed meals at home all the time? Someone who doesn't exercise enough? Someone who doesn't drink enough glasses of water every day?
Maybe it's the difference between the US and Europe, but here in Europe, not all doctors recommend all available vaccines. I wouldn't trust my doctor if he would recommend that I (or my children) get a vaccine against flue for example.
I try to avoid drugs as much as possible because I think most non-severe illness (headache, flue, etc...) can just be cured by getting some rest and trusting your body. From my experience, the people I know that take the most drugs are the ones that are the most ill (and I'm talking non-server illness here, of course I'd take drugs if I had a cancer). I don't now if there is a causality, but I would tend to think so.
So yeah, I have kind of the same approach to vaccination : I take vaccine for sever illness, but I would never vaccine against flue before I'm 90 years old.
Now, I've lived in the US for some time and I've been shocked by the amount of drugs people take everytime they feel somewhat bad. I think there is a middleground between the "listen to your body, it will cure cancer by itself" bullshit and the "omg, I have a headache, let's eat these 3 pills". Same for vaccine.
Has any study yet been done on autism rates in the unvaccinated children of antivaxers?
Note that by "antivaxer" I mean those concerned about long-discredited hoaxes that claimed vaccines might have certain side effects which we now know they do not. There are other groups who don't vaccinate for other reasons, like the Amish, and some of them do indeed show lower autism rates. But AFAIK, in all known cases of such groups, there are far too many other variables in play to simply infer that these low rates are due to lack of vaccinations: they lead lives so different from the "typical" American public that any number of factors could be contributing, and that needs to be accounted for.
A person who thinks a vaccine causes autism is liable to start blaming their doctor for whatever other ailments crop up in their kids life. Which is only no big deal if you don't have a family yourself or reputation.
Why would any doc want that?
Vaccine refusal for standard childhood vaccines could be considered child neglect.
There are parents who don't want their children to have the chicken pox vaccine and then expose them to chicken pox. That's child abuse. The vaccine is far lower risk than actually getting the disease.
I am not anti-vax, but I have seen nothing that makes me believe "vaccines rely on herd immunity".
A functional vaccine induces antibody production in the vaccinated host and that's it. The herd is not involved.
Unvaccinated individuals, however, rely on being surrounded by immune individuals in order to "free load" on the herd's immunity. This is immoral if you believe in Kant's Categorical Imperative.
I don't know where this idea you have got started, but it's like a meme now... people just repeat it without evidence all the time.
If somebody doesn't trust vaccines, why are they going to a doctor in the first place?
The sound science behind vaccinations is by and large the same sound science that doctor is going to be using when he diagnoses you and prescribes a treatment. You can't reject one without rejecting the other.
Unlike you, they have more important concerns in life than making $40. Like, you know, having a fucking brain and trying to help people. Jesus christ you people are stupid.
I think people today are generally spoiled by good customer service at large retailers like Amazon or Best Buy, where the business writes off 1-2% of asshole customers who consume most of the customer support resources as the cost of doing business.
The problem is, that doesn't extend to small businesses, where one bad customer can quite literally eat up a majority of the proprietor's time and energy, and the business doesn't have the depth to just send the customer free stuff to make them happy. Had that happen with a scout troop I volunteer for a couple times, where one obnoxious parent consumed hundred of hours of volunteer time before they were told to leave.
If I were a physician, I'd certainly trade one marginal (in the economic sense) customer for the freedom from losing sleep at night about whether their child is dying from one of any number of untreatable disastrous diseases. If my patients are going to argue with me about whether vaccines are, in fact, the greatest medical development for humanity in the past two centuries, how on earth am I supposed to be able to get them to consent to any other medical science?
Now if only we could get the kids taken away from dumbass parents who won't properly care for them.
This will cause the unvaccinated patients to congregate at a few clinics so that there will be more epidemics and eventually let the diseases evolve to be resistant to the vaccine.
anti-vax morons "Boys who did not receive the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine during the mid 1990s are now collecting in large numbers in secondary schools and colleges and this provides a perfect breeding ground for the virus" http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/03/100330082722.htm
I think what the parent post meant is that all vaccines have some percent of people who don't have the desired antibody response, so you want to keep the unvaccinated numbers as low as possible in order to protect them. There are also the populations of very young/very old/immune compromised who can't be vaccinated. It's these groups most at risk from the willful vaccine refusers.
The reason doctors are professionals and not just regular people is they have a legal and ethical obligation to do what is in the best health interests of the patient, not necessarily their best financial interests. In the UK they go so far as to employ the doctors directly by the NHS and then give them more money based on things like the number of patients they can get to quit smoking.
Governments are really the only entity that can reasonably assume control over people who actually shouldn't be employed. We shouldn't ever need police, or fire services, because if people just stopped committing crimes we wouldn't need police. If people actually did all the fire safety stuff they're told to there would be a lot less need for fire services. If people actually do what doctors say, quit smoking, take these vaccines etc. we'd need a lot less of them. By your reasoning all 3 of those groups love it when people light fire to malls with people inside or when there are mass shootings. The police have a huge crime to investigate, which keeps them employed for years, fire departments collect major overtime and doctors get a huge collection of patients. The reason the government runs these things is because they are the only ones who can pay people to try and put themselves out of a job, but provide some sort of guarantee that they won't actually be put out of a job.
In the US you don't want people in your office or clinic who don't have vaccines (because they may infect you, your staff, or other patients, including those who are too young to be vaccinated yet, or those too old to survive even mitigated disease because they're vaccinated), you don't want to have to do major work on people because they didn't get vaccines. Especially with insurance as it is in the US, do you want to be liable for someone who contracted whooping cough because you let non vaccinated people into your building?
I recently went shopping around for a new family doctor and one came recommended. During the initial "interview" she gave be some stuff to read on maintaining family health, etc. A lot of stuff on diet and such, but one section was about how vaccines are linked to autism and that vaccines are a big scam and H1N1 didn't kill anyone, it was all some big conspiracy. After reading this I canceled our future appointments. It's not just patients who are dumb and getting "fired", some doctors are actively pushing this "vaccines are bad" stuff and they should be fired too.
Doctors want unquestioning obedience. They don't want their authority to be challenged.
Even if you do vaccinate your child, you'd best run from any doctor who gets rid of these patients.
BTW, some of these diseases really are quite extinct in the US. Getting infected is about as likely as getting hit by lightening. It's not unreasonable to decide that the vaccine risk (yes, there is risk) isn't worthwhile. It's not unreasonable to notice the political aspects of vaccines, with all the industry lobbying, and decide that the pro-vaccine messages are inherently untrustworthy.
Well, you're pretty ignorant, but true to form of the ignorant you are also incredibly confident and condescending in your ignorance. Vaccines are not 100% effective. They're upwards of 95%, but they are not a guarantee of protection. Herd immunity means that a group of individuals with near-100% immunity individually are effectively immune as those few who are actually still vulnerable have no vectors to be exposed to the disease as everyone around them IS truly immune.
There, now instead of assuming you know what herd immunity is and how vaccines work, you ACTUALLY know what herd immunity is and how vaccines rely on it.
i totally agree that doctors should be allowed to ban patients that do not follow a dr's reasonable medical advice. this is especially true when that advice is backed up by solid medical research.
the think that bothers me more is the fact that these parents are not only putting their children at fatal risk for diseases that are totally preventable, but they also put other children, especially newborns, at risk of these diseases as well. preventing these diseases relies on "herd vaccination". these vaccines are not 100% effective, there will be some people that do not become immunized even though they received the vaccination. but because everyone else (is supposed to) get vaccinated, these people are still protected in that the disease should not be able to propagate to them. with these idiots deciding to not vaccinate, now there are more people not immunized and now the risk of transmission increases. in addition, newborns cannot be vaccinated until something like 8 months old. so these idiots are putting children too young to be immunized at risk. we live in a society, and that means people in the society need to participate in creating a safe world for all of us.
maybe we should take this a bit farther and deport those people that do not want to immunize. they are free to not immunize, but they cannot live in this society should they choose this option.
schleprock
. . . patient stupidity.
If a doctor recommends a vaccine for a child, and the parents refuse the vaccine, then the child catches the flu and dies. Guess what? The doctor is open to litigation. It is a sad state of affairs, but the end result of that lawsuit is probably either settlement out-of-court or a judgment against the doctor. After all, why didn't the doctor educate the parents how they were wrong about autism risks? Why didn't the doctor show studies to the parents so they could have made a more educated decision? The fault will not be on the parents' heads -- at the very least the doctor will have to pay an attorney to defend from the inevitable lawsuit.
Why should a doctor saddle up with 1) Patients that refuse care and 2) Legal risk. If I were a family physician and I had people putting themselves or dependents at risk against my medical advice (A.M.A.), I would "fire" them, too. In the end, we aren't talking about emergency care here. We are talking about medical maintenance, and they can find someone else.
Why stop there? Why not go after smokers, gluttons, and others who ignore their doctor's medical advice. If patients aren't going to heed their advice, doctors should have a right to refuse to waste their time and everyone else's resources on them. Why should anyone but the person(s) responsible for failing to heed their doctor's advice have to suffer from the consequences. If you're not vaccinated I don't want you any where near myself or my children. You are an endangerment to everyone you're around and docs recognize this. If you fail to stop eating the caloric requirements for three people or smoke like a chimney why should I have to contribute to keeping you alive? If you're not going to take the full course of antibiotics prescribed then you have no business getting them in the first place. You're needlessly increasing the risk of creating resistant strains. etc. etc.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
Doctors may be right but parent's concern is right too, because complications do happen, say 1 in 10000. It may be 0.01% for the doctor. Who knows which perfectly healthy child would not be there next day because he/she got a vaccine yesterday and 0.01% mathematical probability got to him/her. When it is your own child that 0.001% becomes 100% devastating. I vaccinated my kids but did worry and it was a tough decision, left it to fate and proceeded to vaccinate. Considering the outcome from parent's perspective doctors denying care seem arrogant to me. But that is nothing, compared to other corruption in medical industry. 70% paediatricians malpractice and more alarming is that the malpracticing doctors are more famous than regular doctors. Think imaging labs and doctors tie up here. I was almost scammed when I took my 3 days old baby for a regular after birth check up. The best clue is ask the clinic if they will see non-insured patient, if they say no then they exist only to scam. I have no insurance yet the doctor I got was a scammer. His clinic is rated 4/5 too because he makes more money and thus is able to afford more good looking attendants and patients give high rating because there was less wait.
My family doctor will give new patients 6 months to stop smoking or he refers them elsewhere. His line is that his job is to keep patients healthy and that he can't do that if they are smoking. These are caretakers, and they will inevitably come to care about their patients. If they wanted to make money, they would have gone into a specialized field.
Is there anything better than clicking through Microsoft ads on Slashdot?
Despite the claims of the pharmaceutical industry, not all medical professionals agree with some of the concoctions being labeled as 'vaccines'. This discussion is sounding like a religious war. People from both sides are ignoring the issues, and resorting to name calling. In this very forum, I've seen somebody accusing their opponents of being morons. The fact is that you can't truthfully describe all vaccines as being beneficial to all people. Vaccines are made in different ways and come with different risks. People are unique and react differently. There is a good reason that the medical industry is called a 'practice'. There are too many variables. The doctors do the best they can with the information that they have.
There is a problem with doctors refusing to see patients who don't believe in vaccines. What if doctors stopped treating people who don't give up smoking? Or maybe they won't see you if you drink alcohol? Perhaps you don't follow their diet recommendations - so they stop allowing you into their offices? Would it be okay if they refused service because you have multiple sexual partners? No. These are individual choices that carry various risks, but the individual has a right to make those choices. The doctor is supposed to give advice, and try to help as much as he can, but it is immoral for him to turn away people who need his help.
There are situations where Herd immunity is very important.
People can be in situations where they cannot take vaccines for various health reasons, and in these cases these people rely on the effects of Herd Immunity to keep from getting sick.
When some idiot refuses to get vaccines without an actual, good, reason, they hurt people who dont have that choice.
If taking the vaccine will kill you because of allergic reaction, for example, you dont have much choice if the vaccine that exsists ONLY exists in that way. Sometimes there are other options, but not always, it depends on the vaccine and why they cant take it.
If patients become sick the Doctor/HMO/Insurance company lose lots of money fixing everything. The financial incentive to "fire patients" shouldn't be ignored. Unfortunately in the US the financial incentives of the Doctors and Hospitals have been cooped by the Health Insurance industry.
tomorrow who's gonna fuss
They're job is at the frontlines of public health. Vaccines are key to that. They are taking care of the majority of patients who aren't mental retards who buy into the lies of Andrew Wakefield.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Working to have a healthy child is a matter of teamwork. True, the doctor thinks he/she is the quarterback, but the parent is the manager. If the players can't sync it is time to rearrange the team components. So, if the quarterback wants to go to a different team...
Medical treatment is often a matter of probability, not proof. Probability is hard to understand for someone who doesn't deal in math a lot. Many parents I've met would rather believe their own superstitions than do the research that would lead them to a reasonable conclusion about their children's health. (For one thing, it is very, very, VERY time-consuming!)
I'm on the side that thinks vaccination does much more good than harm, but I've never had to try to explain an unexplainable case of autism or mental health issue to a parent that wants an answer to, "Why us?"
"The mind works quicker than you think!"
especially the ones that refuse vaccination due to Internet based fact and faith. I get a great kick at see them running back and begging to vaccinate their kids at the first sign of an outbreak (or even more moronic when the school board threaten to kick their kids out of school if their vaccination are not up to date).
Stupidity makes for some good laughing moments.
For some diseases, you have more than one option (again, polio for example) the choice of which one is used mainly depends on epidemiological considerations, which are made at a population level (i.e. herd).
You don't need to give a 3 month old an HPV vaccine. I refused it for my daughter. Didn't get kicked out. But that was because it was being paid by medicaid (welfare) and you get much better (and completely free) service that way. You just have to hide your income a little.
First of all, who says physicans are "Professionals", any more than Lawers and Politicians. Many are, but many are not - just try asking one of them for alternative care other than pills.
Second, if parents have legitimate concerns about alergeric reactions to the contents of the vacines, why shouldn't they able to opt-out of them for their kids?
Third, the drug companies have only one first priority - profit for share-holders.
The key part of the article is "according to vaccine researchers"...
Help! I am a self-aware entity trapped in an abstract function!
This sounds perfectly good to me. If someone has voluntarily chosen to become an infectious disease vector I'd consider it a positive if my doctor barred them from their practice.
Should we fire doctors who refuse to be vaccinated with Tamiflu? ... even though it's now been largely shown to have been an engineered media scare to sell a premature drug for which little clinical evidence existed and for which side-effects and complications are now becoming apparent?
I'm not saying people shouldn't get vaccines. But doctors blindly trusting 'current empirical practice' to the extent they're penalising patients for not 'getting on board' makes me a bit sceptical. At the very least they should be attempting to educate their patients in an intelligent (read: not patronizing) way -- and in the process educating themselves with the updated literature. For the most part, I doubt most doctors have read basic research dealing with the ongoing controversy around many vaccines (no, I'm not referring to the autism scare).
I had a mumps vaccine about a year ago, in the form of MMR (I had the two components already, but it turns out mandatory mumps vaccination wasn't policy in australia in my day, and previous vaccination for other two components isn't a contraindication for the combined vaccine). I developed parotitis shortly afterwards, which is a recognised complication of the mumps component. (So is orchitis, btw, carrying a risk for sterility). I then decided to read some of the literature on mumps. Turns out that, while it's not necessarily condemning of the mumps vaccination, there *are* legitimate concerns about risk of complications vs probability of contracting the disease in the first place, and vs severity or even potential *benefits* of contracting the disease naturally compared to vaccination, etc. I would have had the mumps vaccine anyway (not least because the health check for my new job demanded it). But still, I wish people had flagged, and related these facts to me, at the very least so I could know what I should expect and give proper informed consent to my treatment; rather than go with the whole "WHAT? You want to know more about the vaccine!? Why, I bet you're an ignorant redneck! Go find another doctor!"
As for the people who are too eager and quick to assume the majority of these parents are simply ignorant rednecks who don't give a shit about their children's health, I'd tell you to get out of your self-righteous hole and re-examine the situation. Many spokesmen are either educated people, who have legitimate reasons to be concerned, or people who have been disappointed by the slapdash nature of healthcare services once or twice before and wish to be less passive in their health management. While that doesn't automatically put them in the right, it doesn't mean they should be automatically humiliated, vilified and punished either.
If I spent twelve years in medical school, and then had some moron refuse my advice due to something she heard Jenny McCarthy say on the Oprah Winfrey Show, yeah I'd tell them to go to hell too.
"Unvaccinated individuals, however, rely on being surrounded by immune individuals in order to "free load" on the herd's immunity."
Correct. Annnnddd... vaccines are not 100% effective, even in healthy individuals, and some not-so-healthy (elderly, infirm, immune-compromised) individuals just don't get much benefit from vaccines at all. So some percentage of people are in that "freeloading" category whether they like it or not, through no fault of their own.
We like to think of vaccines as existing to protect those people too. When they're unprotected because a bunch of tools chose not to get immunized, it's a failure of the vaccination strategy, and it opens us up to more lethal and persistent outbreaks.
So sure, "house of cards" is putting it a little strong. But herd immunity isn't bunk either.
I'm currently in the 3rd year of my MD/PhD program. And this topic is something we have actually brought up pretty often. Its a lot more complicated than the article points out. For example, ER docs don't have some of the same lee-way as privately owned-practices.
Most people don't seem to have a problem with it, because you can always "find another doctor". But the interesting thing, that is suggested in the article, is that the practice is increasing. It becomes an issue if you are out in a rural area, and there are only two doctors that serve the area and both refuse to treat people who aren't vaccinated. If the patient doesn't have the money to travel to another doctor, it becomes a serious dilemma for that patient/family.
We do work with some private practice physicians in the area. And about 8 months ago I was in a clinic that was instituting this policy. They typed up a letter explaining that their clinic was going to stop seeing people that weren't vaccinated. They were giving 6 months of notice, so they could keep getting care with them until they could find a new physician. Most would walk out that day upset, and never come back.
But some had issues with insurance only providing care at certain clinics, of which ours was really the only easily accessible for them.
Anyway, its a pretty complicated problem all in all. But an interesting one to think about.
(also, get yourself and kids vaccinated)
Having a "flu" is not like having a cold. Flu can and does kill children and the elderly. The flu shot is very safe because it contains no live viruses. The only problem is in people allergic to eggs.
Having unvaccinated children come in liability issue.
http://www.cdc.gov/flu/keyfacts.htm
btw: If you had said no chickenpox vaccine I would have agreed with you.
You should more carefully read the risks associated with some of the products being marketed as vaccines. Perhaps you could argue that statistically, your chances are better with the vaccine than without it. However, there are documented cases where individuals have suffered severely and even died as a result of a vaccination. Every medical treatment includes some risk. Refusing a medical treatment also involves some risk. Since it is my life that I'm risking, it should be my decision about which risk is greater, in my opinion.
Since you want doctors to turn away patients who don't follow their advice in regards to vaccinations, I assume you'd also want them to turn away fat people because they eat too much, flabby people because they don't exercise, smokers, drinkers, etc. The medical industry makes a lot of recommendations, but doctors took an oath to help people. As far as I know, that oath didn't include an exception that allowed them to turn people away just because they don't follow all their advice.
Doctors and the medical community have been wrong before, and while I doubt that is the case here
If most people are getting the disease, then you'd damn well better take the lesser risk of the vaccine.
If a thousand people get the disease each year, all of whom live in northern Africa or southern Asia, the risk situation is completely different. There is no realistic chance of getting the disease. The chance of vaccine-related death or retardation becomes higher than the chance of even getting the disease, never mind getting hurt by the disease.
Where do you draw the line? This is complicated by the fact that accessable information sources are obviously compromised. On both sides you can see blind groupthink. One side has a very obvious financial motive and a huge lobbying effort.
One would think your pediatrician would just check your scheduled vaccines, and skip any which contain eggs and have no non-egg substitute.
As others have said here, if your doctor isn't willing to do that, you need another doctor anyway.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
The doctor is supposed to give advice, and try to help as much as he can, but it is immoral for him to turn away people who need his help.
And the word for when a doctor is trying to help his patients who don't listen to him is "a waste of time". What exactly is your point?
Ezekiel 23:20
In case anyone is confused and thinks that idiotic "study" is meaningful, here's a straightforward critique:
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/vaccine-schedules-and-infant-mortality-a-false-relationship-promoted-by-the-anti-vaccine-movement/
Also a simple Google search away...
Correlation does not equal causation.
If you look at the Infant mortality statistics in America for example, the leading cause of infant death is congenital malformations (birth defects), followed by low birthweight and gestational problems, and so on. Which of these can you blame on vaccines? None. Quit spreading FUD.
"Adults have the greatest risk for dying from chickenpox, with infants having the next highest risk. Males (both boys and men) have a higher risk for a severe case of chickenpox than females. Children who catch chickenpox from family members are likely to have a more severe case than if they caught it outside the home. The older the child, the higher the risk for a more severe case...." http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/disease/chickenpox/possible-complications.html
You stereotypers are all the same...
I have never been to a Dr. where I felt it was about keeping people healthy. I wonder what that would be like. I have been to many Drs. where I felt it was all about them getting money. And I can't tell you how many times I've left because the Dr. didn't wash his/her hands. There are way, way more incompetent Drs. than most people think.
Obviously your notion of "meds" is pretty hazy.
I love my endocrinologist. I have diabetes and she's superbly competent at helping me manage it.
However, her initial speech to patients is fairly straightforward.
"We'll discuss alternatives and your specific circumstances. Then I'll tell you what to do. You'll do it. I'll know if you do what I tell you because you'll bring in your meter and I'll download all the info in it at every checkup. I'll do the blood work. I'll know if you're following my directions. If you don't follow my directions, you won't have to worry about disappointing me. You'll just have to find a new endocrinologist because I'll fire you as my patient."
I appreciated the straightforwardness. I think some patients would be mighty put off but that's why some doctors and some patients are a bad mix and should go their separate ways.
The doctor prefers patients who bring in a dependable revenue stream from all the vaccination visits. Otherwise their revenue stream is bumpy and dependent on children actually being sick coming in.
just like how there is 'straightforward critique' of all kinds of things that infringe upon a private industry's profits. like global warming.
numbers talk. is the infant mortality RATE in countries which administer more vaccines higher, regardless of their developed status ?
yes.
Read radical news here
You post a link to infowars and expect people to take you seriously??
Let's just stick to science, ok?
Correlation does not equal causation. And anyone that claims otherwise is an idiot, i.e. you.
Infant mortality is not something that can be shown to be clearly linked to vaccinations in such a simple manner.
Here are a bunch more spurious correlations for you to think about:
http://www.southalabama.edu/coe/bset/johnson/oh_master/Ch11/Tab11-02.pdf
OK, we get it. No need to post the same link over and over again.
First, I think vaccines are mostly safe. And, like any medicines, _some_ people will have side effects.That said, I can't subscribe to wholesale vaccinations like we've been trained and indoctrinated into believing in.
I also think that vaccinating starting immediately at birth are not a good idea either.
I delayed vaccines until my daughter was a few months old, it gave me time to know how she acts, interacts with us and her surroundings, and gave me a baseline to evaluate her condition. Note, I said delayed, not refused.
I'm glad I did it this way too. My daughter did have an averse reaction to the vaccine. Enough so that we're very careful what she gets (we being the doctor too). Basically she stopped interacting with us and with most things around her. It was very scary. Let me tell you there's nothing scarier than seeing your child change like that (short of life-threatening complications). Fortunately I have a doctor that works with me. [Oh, and not all doctors give their own kids the "suggested" vaccinations fully either, though you'll be hard pressed to get many to formally admit that they don't.]
So here's my question: If doctors effectively refuse treatment unless the child is vaccinated over the parent's objections, and the child has an adverse reaction to the vaccination, will that doctor be liable? Will the doctor pay for ongoing care if that child now needs it? I'm not talking about autism, I'm talking about any adverse reaction, whatever it happens to be, though that _could_ be autism too. I do not think a doctor should be allowed to "fire" a patient for disagreeing over a medical procedure. And if that is a possibility then the doctors should be required to take on the additional liability when things go wrong, because they will.
The reality is that vaccines, like any medicine, will cause an adverse reaction in some people. It's to be expected. And forcing people to put a gun to their head and play russian roulette with side effects is not right. Testing needs to be improved, and alternate schedules put in place to allow for a more controlled vaccination regimen for those that either choose it or have adverse reactions to the standard. Ideally, identify what the most critical vaccines are and give those instead of the shot gun approach ramming as many pathogens into immune systems as possible.
Instead, because an in-depth study or pursuit of alternate schedules or fewer vaccines would be seen as giving credence to the scare tactics of the anti-vaccination group, we don't get any real options. Instead all we are left with are the two extreme factions of everything or nothing, with no middle ground as an option.
This claim was debunked a while back. You're misreading the data and playing with faulty IMRs.
You've posted this several times. What's it like not to know the difference between correlation and causation?
Stop showing everyone how naive you are by posting links to infowars. It's fucking stupid.
Natural News, Infowars, and Vactruth in the first 4 results. Yeah, no anti-vaccine bias there!
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
And the article countering this "study":
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/vaccine-schedules-and-infant-mortality-a-false-relationship-promoted-by-the-anti-vaccine-movement/
Correlation does not equal causation. And anyone that claims otherwise is an idiot, i.e. you.
Infant mortality is not something that can be shown to be clearly linked to vaccinations in such a simple manner.
Here are a bunch more spurious correlations for you to think about:
http://www.southalabama.edu/coe/bset/johnson/oh_master/Ch11/Tab11-02.pdf
Correlation does not equal causation. And anyone that claims otherwise is an idiot, i.e. you.
oh yes. surely the respectable names which had their study published in a respectable, nationally indexed medical journal, were stupid to the extent of not being able to realize that, and do their research accordingly.
like me.
only random twats on internet know that correlation does not equal causation and make grandstanding statements by using that.
how about actually going and fucking reading the paper in scribd, and then claiming grandstand ?
Read radical news here
Illiterate summary. You can't fire a client or customer. You can only abandon them by refusing to continue to treat them.
A client or customer can fire a professional whose services they have retained, however.
I got a flu shot this year and still got sick a week later. It might not have been the flu, but it certainly didn't keep me out of the doctor's office for a prescription for what I had then.
Correlation does not imply causation. And that is all that study is. A good response is http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/vaccine-schedules-and-infant-mortality-a-false-relationship-promoted-by-the-anti-vaccine-movement/
One major flaw is that they do not account for the fact that each country has a different standard for how they count live births, which directly affects their infant mortality rates. The US counts every child born with any signs of life as a live birth, while other countries don't count babies born before a certain point or who are too small or critically ill at birth or die within 24 hours of birth as a live birth and so will have lower infant mortality rates.
The parents believe in their minds that they are in fact VERY interested in their child's well-being. Hence not wanting to vaccinate them.
The charitable interpretation is that the parents are deluding themselves, and indulging in a nasty form of child abuse.
Or did you mean "interested in their child's well-being" and actively working against it? That's the less charitable interpretation.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
is this 'idiots' parade day' on slashdot ?
Must be. You've spammed the same damn link here 6 times so far.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
Seriously - you want to be a disease vector for hideous diseases that are easily preventable. Go live somewhere else.
Advice: on VPS providers
why should I take even the tiny risk of having a vaccination to protect some idiot who refuses to get vaccinated themselves?
Simple - some people are unable to be vaccinated due to perfectly valid medical issues. They still benefit from herd immunity as long as the herd actually has it.
One person might be highly allergic to eggs and might not be able to get some particular vaccine as a result. However, if everybody around them isn't allergic to eggs wouldn't it be nice if they were vaccinated, thus greatly reducing the chance that any of them will get sick?
Some medical issues really do involve a tragedy of the commons. One is vaccination. Another big one is antibiotic use.
Except you failed to establish its vaccination causing mortality. The smart money's on the vaccination rate reflecting the disease prevalence and variety, more diseases that need vaccination against.
I didn't need vaccination for smallpox, since it was extinct here before I was born. But I had the vaccine as a child before travelling abroad where it wasn't extinct yet. You can bet I'll have any advised protection if I ever head somewhere tropical. More disease is the cause of both mortality and the medical response to disease.
If only we could make Google think for dumb fucks using it.
An item you linked to:
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/vaccine-schedules-and-infant-mortality-a-false-relationship-promoted-by-the-anti-vaccine-movement/
Your link does not support your conclusions.
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/vaccine-schedules-and-infant-mortality-a-false-relationship-promoted-by-the-anti-vaccine-movement/
Not sure why there's a big deal about this. Doctors have fired their patients for much sillier/not *directly* related to overall health reasons. Dad's a hunter and has a gun? OK, fire the patient.
People that actually research instead of regurgitating aren't welcome here. Don't upset the hive mind.
Think of it this way, you're the Doctor, and you tell your patient's guardian that you would rather the patient with the 'compromised immune system' not return to his practice which is likely filled with other young disease 'carriers'.
If everybody else in the practice is immunized, the patient at the greatest risk of harm is the one with no immunization. Assuming all the sick kids aren't there for the same thing, the unvaccinated kid could pick up more than one problem in the waiting room. You know the unhygenic room where all the sick people sit next to each other, handle the same magazines, breathe the same germ filled air, touch all the same doorknobs.
for example, the leading cause of infant death is congenital malformations (birth defects), followed by low birthweight and gestational problems, and so on.
Not according to the image you linked to; in it, the category "All Other Causes (residual)" significantly outpaces the causes mentioned in your post.
If you're going to use a source to back your contention, you should probably make sure it actually backs said contention, rather than debunking it.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
you are saying that researches that are damaging to the medical sector, would be published in pro-vaccine outlets ?
oh my.
Anybody about to say "Doctors shouldn't be able to do that!" better not support the patients' right to refuse vaccines. And anybody supporting patients' right to refuse vaccine better not say doctors can't do this.
Liberty in your lifetime
Yea!, you should be forced to buy untested and unneeded products from big drug corps!
Of course Doctors are always smarter...
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/vaccine-schedules-and-infant-mortality-a-false-relationship-promoted-by-the-anti-vaccine-movement/
From your own search query debunking your radical claim
Medical professionals have never claimed that vaccines are 100% effective or 100% safe. Just like any medication there are risks and side effects; however, they are overwhelmingly safe and effective for the vast majority of people. This is one side of the debate. They other side of the debate has absolutely no evidence but keep holding fast to the belief that there is a link between vaccines and Autism. The only support they have it the initial study which has been discredited because the doctor falsified the data. I see this as the same as the evolution/intelligent design debate. One side has all evidence; the other side has all the rhetoric.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
What the doctors are saying is that they know more then the parents who sit at google and search keywords. The vaccines were developed to be as safe as possible and to mitigate the very real risk of disease, for a parent to refuse a vaccination for the kid there saying that they want the child to have an increased risk of getting sick or even dying.
The doctor should and does have every right to kick the family out of the practice, doesn't the doctors oath say "Do no harm" which is what the vaccination does! It prevents harm. There really up holding there own oath.
How is this correlation controlled for?
For example:
1) Do these statistics include infant deaths prior to vaccinizations? (not omitting these can skew results when trying to understand the impact of the vaccination)
2) Is any attempt made to control for extremely high risk or premature live births in areas with better neonatal capabilities? (Alternatively are extremely high risk/premature deliveries of infants that don't live to vaccination age counted as deaths in countries without highly specialized neonatal care)?
Are there any other cultural or environmental factors considered such as genetic/ethnic makeup as it pertains to certain infant diseases, or in particular the exposure of the mother's immune system to specific illness that may cause an immune response?
I guess what I am asking is:
How do we know that the infant mortality rate is attributable to the vaccination process rather than the countries in question having enough technology to simply keep more borderline cases viable in the first place?
Is there an actual link of this to vaccines?
No.
Check and mate.
The doctor could easily proactively protect himself against cases like that by having the parent sign a disclaimer. "Prescribed routine vaccinations against [list]; patient refused - signed I. M. Takingachancewithmychildren".
The vaccine protects my family because the family members who were vaccinated will not carry the disease and give it to my infant who is not yet old enough to be vaccinated or my child who received it but did not get immunity from it. In other words, you are protected by the vaccine if either you got it and it gave you immunity OR a sufficient amount of the people surrounding you have immunity (herd immunity).
In fact, look at how smallpox was completely eliminated. Did they do it by vaccinating 100% of the population? No, they just vaccinated enough to create herd immunity, preventing the disease from spreading to the point where it died out.
dom
It's funny, one of the first things you learn in a statistics class is that statistics are very dependent on how they're collected, determined, and described. You can make statistics to mean a lot of different things. I'm not judging the content of your link (I didn't read it), but saying that there is a statistic so it must describe the truth without any other information is just dumb.
I don't have time to make a sig
I can see this as nothing but a good thing for a doctor.
I've always wondered why dentists give away toothbrushes. You'd think they would hand out candy after the visit.
Godaddy is a scam and a ripoff.
What if your doctor (or dentist, or pharmacy technician) asked you to go somewhere else unless you receive their HPV vaccine? What if Walgreens started asking customers that hadn't received their flu vaccine to shop elsewhere?
What about the doctor's other patients? In 2008 three babies got measles from being in a doctor's waiting room with an infectious child, a similar incident also happened in San Diego. Any money made by treating the sick children would probably be lost once the other parents sued. (Usually the anti-vaccine parent has to sign a waver not to sue, but if they don't then even they could also sue.) Also if the doctor participates in an HMO plan, part of how they get paid is by measuring statistics such as how many children are vaccinated. Finally, even if the doctor makes more money, the people who really end up paying for a child hospitalized with measles is everyone else (either through higher insurance rates, or through taxes if the child is uninsured or covered by state insurance).
First of all, who says physicans are "Professionals", any more than Lawers and Politicians. Many are, but many are not - just try asking one of them for alternative care other than pills.
That depends on the doctor - the biggest hurdle "alternative care" faces at the moment is the lack of hard research showing it works, and that's starting to change.
Second, if parents have legitimate concerns about alergeric reactions to the contents of the vacines, why shouldn't they able to opt-out of them for their kids?
I have allergies. They can be worked around.
Also, slight strawman here - no-one's saying this kid is *forced* to get vaccinated. The parents can still choose not to - the doctor is just choosing not to continue care in that case. Everyone's got a choice.
Third, the drug companies have only one first priority - profit for share-holders.
And this is relevant how? Last I heard, drug companies aren't big fans of vaccines because they're cheap and non-profitable.
At both health centers where I live, all employees are required to receive the flu vaccine, or they will be shamed into termination. Shame includes wearing a facemask at all times while working, poor performance reviews, and they will not receive any pay increases (yes, this was all spelled out in memos to the staff).
Ah - The joys of Obamacare, get ready for more of this folks - a lot more, next will be the smokers, the drinkers, the drug users and the Obese.
Obama may be able to force you to buy his version of health insurance - but he can't force the Doctor to treat you.
If the statement that 26 vaccines are required in the US didn't set off your bullshit detector, it must be broken. If the article opens with such an obvious lie, the likelihood that any of the rest of it contains anything factual is probably near zero.
This is the internet. You don't have to believe everything you read. You can actually look stuff up.
Try this: http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/recs/schedules/child-schedule.htm#parents
Ideology: A tool used primarily to avoid the bother of thinking.
Both of my children had seizures after vaccines. We know that many
pharmaceutical companies put products on the market that cause awful side effects before they are pulled. A calculated risk...ours. So is it hysteria to wonder what is in these newer vaccines?
Vaccine avoidance is a dangerous situation all around but the industry has brought this kind of distrust on themselves. Maybe these
doctors ought to do more research; not just take the drug rep's word for it. Did they inquire into the nature of these parents' fears?
If RiteAid could put a shampoo on the shelve 30 years ago that was called "Placenta" until it was pulled as grotesquely unmarketable, those who wonder
about the products they are shooting into their children's arms today are not necessarily "morons."
You know what? Global temperatures have risen inversely proportionally to reduction of the number of pirates in the world's oceans too!
Correlation is not causation. There are lots of more plausible explanations for that have nothing to do with vaccination.
They do to a degree rely on the herd. Vaccines are 'only' 70-90% effective. That last bit is where the herd immunity kicks in to either eradicate or effectively eradicate the disease. If there are TOO many unvaccinated individuals, they form a reservoir that keeps the disease around and results in a few vaccinated individuals getting sick.
Naturally, that effect is much weaker for highly mutable diseases like the flu.
It must really suck to be a doctor sometimes having to put up with "customers" who think they know everything. Especially when that knowledge is fringe / conspiracy / whacknut / nonsense they got from Joe Bigfoot off the Internet.
I am glad there is public awareness and pressure on vaccines to make it as safe as possible and prevent recurrances of previous issues... but refusers are still dangerous idiots in my view.
From a market perspective the only thing worse than a conspiracy whacknut customer is no customer. Why do doctors feel they can get away with this? I'm sure there are limits to the types of customers any business will tolerate but why is it a growing trend? More people living on the Internet?
Why is Medicine immune from cost competition? Scarcity of doctors? I'm sure this is true to some extent but the phone book is full of doctors.. I've long suspected the real problem is insurance reinforcing the need for itself. People don't know what the cost of something is in advance and even if they did know that knowledge is useless because the effective cost actually paid by insurance is different than the more insane cost published when you ask.
If insurance did not exist and people paid for stuff themselves I'm sure some of the absurdities and waste induced by lack of cost competition would be gone...not that I'm advocating... but the costs and bloat are reaching well into the land of absurdity.. I believe lack of cost compeitition is really core to the doctor firing their patients problem. No industry deserves to be soo well off that it can AFFORD to act that way.
Bullshit.
Once you've had chicken pox the virus never fucking goes away. It comes back again when you get old as something called shingles. Google it.
Believe it or not, most doctors actually care about keeping people healthy. They're not just in it for the money.
Besides, does any doctor really want kids with polio, smallpox, etc. running around their office -- potentially getting other patients sick?
If everyone else is vacinated what do they have to worry about?
You do understand there are people who CAN'T be effectively vaccinated due to being immuno-compromised? All kinds of people from organ donor recipients to cancer patients may have temporarily-to-permanently compromised immune systems. This is part of the "why" the people with a healthy immune system need to be vaccinated, to help protect the people with a weakened immune system.
"Flame away, I wear asbestos underwear"
If your kid is healthy, you may think "Why should I vaccinate?"
The reality is, kids today come into contact with other kids who may not be so healthy. By not vaccinating your healthy kid, they can become a carrier for something that is far more damaging to the immunodeficient kid in their pre-school class.
I guess I forgot that other countries than canada throw around professional somewhat more liberally. A politician is usually not regarded as a professional, while a professional engineer, doctor, or lawyer, or priest would be (it used to be that you had to have a professional certify your passport for example). They are required to pay dues to a professional organization, and to be a member they must have been accredited to get there. A professor or some of the upper levels of public school administration also might be considered professionals.
If parents have concerns about allergic reactions and the doctor doesn't, then no, they shouldn't be able to opt out. That's sort of the point. Parents are stupid and irrational, or just plain wrong, and the doctor is by definition supposed to be objective.
What do drug companies have to do with it? Of course they're in it to make money, Governments demand better prices and fund research to save money (and lives) but making 300 million doses of anything, which is like 4 million doses per year (or more) costs money and you can't expect people to do that work for free. Doctors should not be allowed to get kickbacks from prescribing it so what does it matter?
An analysis of the paper.
An anti-vax funded paper by a known anti-vax (and HIV denying) researcher uses a handful of data points from a weak source, massages the data (such as considering MMR to b 3 shots) and then finds a weak correlation.
Stop the presses!
Or at least the nonsense.
The only searches which come up are almost exclusively from anti-vaccination sites and groups. Hardly a credible sampling there.
There is, however, this: http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/vaccine-schedules-and-infant-mortality-a-false-relationship-promoted-by-the-anti-vaccine-movement/
I don't know about egg allergys being the only problem. I work in a company of about 1800 people. 4 people that know of have come down with Guillain–Barré syndrome within a week of getting a flu shot. Two were never able to come back to work. Only one as fully recovered. They were all advised to never get a flu shot again even though they were told the the flu shot wasn't what caused it. (WTF?) Some how the statistics of: "Guillain–Barré syndrome is rare, at 1–2 cases per 100000 people annually, but is the most common cause of acute non-trauma-related paralysis in the world." (Wikipedia) don't seem to fit this particular population. Not saying you shouldn't immunise your kids but that flu shots may not be as safe as they'd like you to believe.
There are a lot of individuals slamming viewpoints and harsh criticism in both directions on here based on "facts" but no sources are listed. If you reference under this post please post your sources as reference for the "facts" that you portraying, whether for or against vaccines.
The US infant mortality rate is the lowest in the world.
Unless, of course, you don't use the same standard for "infant mortality" when measuring it in different countries.
The reason the US is placed lower on those lists is because in the US we call so much more shit "infant death" than other countries do. 12 weeks premature and dies in the US = infant death. Dies in another country = still born.
It shouldn't be necessary because it should be against the law for parents to refuse basic vaccinations for their children. As an adult, you can choose to make all of the fuckwit decisions that you want for yourself, but you aren't free to make the same stupid and dangerous decisions for you children. In this instance, you aren't only harming your own child with your retarded decision, but you are placing a greater risk on EVERYONE ELSE. As no vaccine is 100% effective, it is crucial that a very large percentage of the population receive the vaccine for it to work properly. In short, I am glad that the doctors are starting to take a stand against this bullshit, because someone needs to.
To the haters: You can't win. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine
Do you have any idea how many children and others were killed by these virulent diseases? To put this in perspective, before vaccinations the list of top ten killers in this country was entirely populated by diseases which today have vaccinations. That same list today is comprised of heart disease and cancer instead of measles and mumps. These diseases kill, and when they don't kill they maim severely, or sterilize, or blind, or like polio make you paraplegic including freezing your lungs so that you have to spend the rest of your life in an Iron lung or you die.
Of course there is a higher mortality, some of the side effects of vaccinations are death. You CAN get real polio from the vaccine. But the odds of a side effect or getting the actual disease are incredibly small, in the range of 1 in a million or billion. But the odds of catastrophic results from not getting the vaccine are FAR higher. With all these vaccination avoiders there is going to be an pandemic some day and all those people who didn't vaccinate their kids are going to be burying them. Almost every one of these childhood vaccinations are diseases that kill adults that get the disease. We've already had several major outbreaks of measles that have killed a significant number of people, I vaguely recall one in a nearby state that killed nearly 700 people. If the CDC and state health officials hadn't quarantined people it probably would have went pandemic. Herd immunity is gone at this point, if you are relying on it to protect your kid you have no idea how many people are refusing vaccines.
What the doctors should do is require the parents who refuse immunizations is to sit down with the doctor and review and sign off on a worst case treatment and care plan for their children for every specific disease their children might get when they refuse the vaccine.
Ask them if their house is multi-level and will they be able to convert a lower-level room to a bedroom if their child needs a wheel chair? Have the parents discussed the care needs should their child develop a more severe form of polio which may leave them a quadriplegic? Will their insurance cover the cost and use of a ventilator?
I think for a lot of these parents the realities of caring for their children -- in many cases, forever -- would be enough to convince them that whatever risk they believe they are avoiding by refusing a vaccine just isn't as bad as the disease itself.
I frankly don't blame the doctors for doing this and I would not be opposed to insurance carriers refusing to reimburse parents for dependent care caused by their refusal to immunize their children (I would, however, require parents to seek treatment and hospitals to treat them).
In other news,
The army back in the world wars found that forcing soldiers to wear helmets on the battlefield had resulted in an increase of head injuries. COINCIDENCE? I don't think so!
Helmets cause head injuries!
-1 Retard.
"No, no, no. Don't tug on that. You never know what it might be attached to."
https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ix=seb&ie=UTF-8&ion=1#hl=en&newwindow=1&safe=off&output=search&sclient=psy-ab&q=infant%20mortality%20rates%20higher%20in%20countries%20with%20vaccine&pbx=1&oq=&aq=&aqi=&aql=&gs_sm=&gs_upl=&fp=12915d1a2a85fa97&ix=seb&ion=1&ix=seb&ion=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.r_qf.,cf.osb&fp=d12e3d4071aa9682&biw=1273&bih=965&ix=seb&ion=1
Man, you're such a fucking troll.
That link is a joke, just like you.
The mean (average) IMR of all the countries within each group was then calculated. Analysis of the unweighted mean IMRs for each group showed a statistically significant relationship between increasing the number of routinely administered infant vaccines during the first year of life and the corresponding infant mortality rate.
The top 5 countries that had the LEAST infant mortality rate were as follows:1. Singapore 2. Sweden 3, Japan 4. Iceland and 5. France
This study’s finding were in- line with previous studies on infant mortality rate and vaccinations. For example, in Japan where vaccines were eliminated for children under the age of 2 in 1975 infant mortality rate subsequently plummeted to the lowest level in the world. Japan changed its infant vaccination schedule again in 1995, but it remains one of the least aggressive in the world with Japan’s IMR remaining low as well (third in 2009).
We all needed you to spam that link a whole bunch of times!
The link you should be look at (past all the anti-vaxxer dribble) is this one - http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/vaccine-schedules-and-infant-mortality-a-false-relationship-promoted-by-the-anti-vaccine-movement/.
And you're still a fucking retard.
"No, no, no. Don't tug on that. You never know what it might be attached to."
Vaccines don't always work, even when administered. However, if you drive the prevalence of the virus down in a population, it becomes much less of a problem and epidemics don't occur.
Also, by choosing to not get vaccinated, you ensure that everyone else has to keep getting vaccinated forever. Right now, I don't have to be inoculated for Smallpox, but I would have to be if even a relatively small population of people had Smallpox again.
the gp never said that he was risking shock, just a "severe" reaction.
neither you nor i are qualified to tell the gp that this is a bullshit concern,
and "just like all the other antivaxxers" sounds like a faulty generalization
to me and undermines your position.
Because willfully endangering other people to eliminate a tiny, tiny risk of discomfort to yourself makes you, basically, a selfish dick.
this not only deprives foolish parents and their children of sound medical care, it pushes more patients towards less ethical or effective practices, promoting bad medicine. I completely agree with the doctors doing this, I just wish it hadn't come to this. As it was pointed out in other comments, parents refusing vaccines for their children is also threatening the 'herd immunity' that existing vaccines rely on, putting many more people than just their children at risk for diseases that today might not exist in america, but I don't know if that tomorrow someone with polio won't step off a plane here, and re-introduce the people who vaccinations don't protect to the sickness again. Hell, it could also mutate given enough time and start affecting people protected from it initially. Stupidity knows no bounds.
2) Is any attempt made to control for extremely high risk or premature live births in areas with better neonatal capabilities?
The US has the best (lowest) infant mortality rate in the world.
But people like unity100 like to trot out the "rankings" that are based on different measuring criteria.
In the US, anything that comes out of a women with any sign of life, and later dies, is chalked up as infant mortality.
Other countries just write them off as still born.
First off, doctors are notorious for knowing jack....anyone who has taken their child to the ER or pediatrician is aware of these. As routinely you must go 2-3 times before the proper care is rendered or correct diagnosis (usually the one you've been exclaiming the whole time as they ignore you).
And for you bloody morons who suck down your throat everything you ever are told. Pull your neuron cluster out of your waste depositor and realize - it's not always correct. (Just research the use of perfectly safe doctor recommended X-rays before the advent of ultrasounds.)
***
Yes, I'm raging pissed about this topic. And you caught me in a bad time as I just had to deal with it 30 minutes ago.
Unlike most of you pie-holes talking, I've actually read a lot regarding this matter. And what I came away with is the following:
1) There is proof of risk of vaccines, maybe not autism. But there are known risks....albeit slim.
And I am willing to take those risks in most cases but not all.
2) Kids immune systems are not fully developed. The medical community being full of lazy people concerned about profit knows that in order to be economical they need less vaccination visits. As such they try to dump 2-3 or even more vaccinations per visit.
3) While studies may show that the vaccine itself is seemingly safe, it does not take into account periodic failures in manufacturing. I used to work for a company that created testing standards. One time we received a standard back because it was off. We re-tested, re-tested...and what did we discover? The NIST standard it was being tested against was in fact off - not ours.
The point being that in all manufacturing, batches come out that are poor grade. And I wager most of the problems we see are from those batches.
4) High contagious infectious diseases warrant vaccinations. But why the frak does my toddler need a HepB vaccine to go to school. Toddlers have nearly zero risk of catching HepB. It's a blood/bodily fluid transferred disease just like HIV. Other than infants born to infected mothers and older kids (entering sexual activity) it's got a very small infection rate. And even an infected child is unlikely to pass the contagion on.
My wife is a nurse. In fact she was very pro-vaccine and dismissed those who objected as just uneducated tin-foil types. She mocked them and thought them silly - just like you.
Not so much anymore. The more you read on the subject, the more you learn about the risks. And the very questionable reporting methods. And a resistance by the medical community to even associate any reaction to the vaccine. (Vaccines can cause problems. Therefore this problem is not vaccine related. Therefore we know vaccines do not cause problems because there are no cases of problems - see the logic error in that reasoning?)
Regardless, I am actually mostly for vaccines. My daughter has received EVERY recommended vaccine but HepB.
But we didn't do it normally. Rather than have my daughter receive 2-4 vaccinations at once. We spread them out, endeavoring only one vaccine at at time as much as possible.
Oh, have you ever seen a child after a vaccination. Half the time my kids have been vaccinated the next 1-2 days they're miserable. It puts a strain on their little bodies. Hitting with 5 vaccinations - who thinks that's a rational intellligent scientific methodology of vaccination of an undeveloped immune system.
What does living in a vaccine dictatorship world mean?
It means, because we didn't do the vaccinations at the doctors scheduled pace. My daughter's pediatrician dropped us. Oh, should I mention we were bringing our daughter in for a painful ear infection and they refused to see us anymore.
Seriously,
Later, when we tried to enroll our daughter in pre-school. She was kicked out on the first day for not having HepB.
And the truth is most of you posters have no frakking clue.
a) half of you haven't had kids
b) half of those who remain, probably let
Vaccines are often grown in media which is derived from aborted babies.
Because it's a tissue culture, the situation isn't quite as horrible as needing to abort babies to produce vaccines. It's just one baby, long ago.
There are plenty of people who care about this anyway. They feel that they would be supporting abortion if they ever make use of anything derived from an aborted baby.
So there you go. Religion is a protected group.
If you read the first such study, you will find that there were indeed 'excitability' effects in the nervous system, but they didn't reach .05 significance.
For symptoms of such importance, there would normally be a followup study with a larger N. Instead, the issue is ignored.
Vaccine safety studies are not good enough.
The Federal government still has a program that pays parents of kids who have serious brain problems following vaccine administration. You don't hear much about how many such kids are hurt.
Medicine is not open enough in all of this. Parents are correct to be very skeptical.
People have the right to chose not to have their kid vaccinated. A doctor that then kicks them out for doing this should then be sued for discrimination. No doctor should be telling a parent what they should do with their kid, NONE. They should be offering advice and that is it.
I define best choice with the overall "best" risk profile. Even with your alleged swine flu vaccination indications it's still very arguably the "best choice".
I guess you don't know how to read? Let me dumb it down for you, since you only communicate in terms of withering scorn.
First poster: vaccines only work if everyone gets one! These unvaccinated people going to kill everyone! It'll be the black death all over again!
Me: No, vaccines work on individuals. The individuals that have antibodies will still have antibodies regardless of who does or doesn't get vaccinated. You are misrepresenting or misunderstanding the concept of "herd immunity" if you think that anti-vaxxers are magically more dangerous than all the other people who don't have antibodies.
Flametard: YOUZ ARE TEH LUZER!!
(The last one was you, in case I was too subtle for you.)
Worrying whether or not their child could be dying from any number of avoidable diseases.
These people piss me off to no end and I'm all for any doctor who wants to show them the door.
And who is screaming your exact same line about big pharma the loudest? Witch doctors and homeopaths and chiropractors who are making money on the other end.
What I want to know is, if a fair number of people are allergic to eggs, why on earth are vaccines made with eggs then? Can't they find something else to make it with?
Are you refering to the Amish? Because they get vacinated.
http://autism.about.com/b/2008/04/23/do-the-amish-vaccinate-indeed-they-do-and-their-autism-rates-may-be-lower.htm
The idea that the Amish do not vaccinate their children is untrue," says Dr. Kevin Strauss, MD, a pediatrician at the CSC. "We run a weekly vaccination clinic and it's very busy." He says Amish vaccinations rates are lower than the general population's, but younger Amish are more likely to be vaccinated than older generations.
People aren't forced to take the vaccines and doctors aren't forced to treat patients who won't follow their directions. Sounds like a good bit of personal freedom going on to me.
This is just the doctor version of no shoes, no shirt, no service (or rather no shot no service). For the record doctors fire patients for other reasons as well, sometimes because they are drug seekers, sometimes because they don't pay, sometimes because they won't take their meds and sometimes because they constantly threaten lawsuits when they aren't able to get in touch with the doctor 24/7.
Isn't this how it's supposed to work? We come to some sort of agreement to trade goods or services and as long as it's beneficial to both parties we do business. When one party finds it no longer beneficial the relationship is severed?
Tell that joke to astronauts dispersing anti-shark dye in water, they might find it decidedly not funny.
http://www.militaryphotos.net/forums/showthread.php?1365-Some-new-Pararescue-photos/page26#378
http://yuckylicious.blogspot.com/2011/11/moonpie.html
Hey don't blame me, IANAB
Yet.
Don't take life too seriously; it isn't permanent.
The link you should have provided is either to Human and Experimental Toxicology or pubmed. Copyright infringement is just plain stupid when there's already a free, legitimate, and superior source.
These guys have a strong statistical link (remember correlation does not imply causation) when they look at the data in certain ways. They thought about possible biases and commented upon them, such as:
Now they give some reasons why possible ecological bias should be discounted, but this paper is certainly not a proof of any kind. What it does do is ask some tough questions that require direct research. They do not address a number of other variables between the US and Europe (and other lower IMR countries). We need to look into this further, but it is no reason to suspend our current immunization scheme as it is. If a parent is overly concerned they can elect to wait an extra six months or so for the regimen.
They tend to "know better what is right for my child" on many
other issues. Their children come in sicker than others because
of the herbal remedies they try first and fail. "I thought
I'd clear up the pneumonia with elderberry extract"
"All other causes" is the sum total of every other disease that leads to death; including pneumonia, measles, mumps, malaria, hepatitis, HIV, drug abuse, etc. None of them are linked to vaccine-related death.
Countries that can afford to have more vaccines ALSO have more car accidents. Should we assume vaccines cause them? No.
I have Lupus that is bad enough that I can rarely even leave the house and often am unable to walk. The only medical care I can get is a general practitioner who is justified in making the point he is not qualified to treat me in an appropriate manner. Physicians care about getting their money with the least amount of effort possible.
For anyone who is wondering, I have Blue Cross/Blue Shield insurance, and I have a legitimate medical diagnosis. The dollars I would provide are just not worth dealing with me. The same is true for people who care enough to do the research and put in the effort to even know to contemplate refusing vaccines. The oaths a physician takes do not mean anything, and the idea of providing medical care for those in need also mean nothing. The state-imposed monopoly physicians enjoy is not about safety or efficacy. It is about them keeping their salaries high, and refusing patients who take too much effort is done for the same reason. Do the research if you doubt me.
Doctor's practices are shrinking as a result of the growing practice of them firing patients with whom they have lost patience.
Additionally, most vaccines are 'leaky' - they don't protect all the time for everyone, even if given on schedule. The vaccine for Hepatitis B, for example, doesn't produce antibodies in about 10% of people. Problem is, you can't tell if a given vaccine with a known leak rate will work for you or not, but if not, you benefit from herd immunity.
Child mortality rates are not calculated via the same metric in every nation. As spirograph sales fell gang violence went up!
So then, why don't they make vaccines in other versions that people aren't allergic to?
A few even wear their hypocrisy like a badge of honor..."I refuse to put my children through any risk of complication whatsoever since I know everyone else will risk their own children and my child will be safe anyway." They fully realize how herd immunity works, and that it's a shared risk, but they totally don't give a shit and are perfectly happy being selfish little fuckwits.
It's ridiculous how ignorant people are of history that we're going to end up having to suffer another major epidemic to squash this stupid anti-vaccination bullshit.
On the other hand, this kind of self-selected exposure to risk might mean that when that shit does hit the fan, the portions of the population most likely to be hit by said flying feces will be the ones that are riskiest to the rest of us -- and thus, statistically speaking, the safest ones to be rid of.
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
Our pediatrician said she could make $100,000 extra a year if she pushed vaccines like other doctors, but she couldn't ethically do so. She described the effectiveness and risks of adverse reaction of each vaccine and let her patients make their own decision.
Wow, everybody seems to be part of the choir being preached to. I assure you, things are a bit different when you're at the other side of that meaningless 99.99% statistic.
Before I risk vaccine damage on my *other* child, first I want to be reasonably certain the vaccine is going to be safe for her particular situation. If the doctors can't be bothered (at my cost) to doing their due diligence and at least CHECK whether my other child may have the same issue, then they're not doing their job and they can fuck off. It's nice to want herd immunity, but losing one child to that ideal is quite enough, thank you very much.
This means that the people with no other protection but herd immunity are being compromised by utter stupidity
So where's the outrage from (a) you, (b) the doctors cited in TFA or (c) the media about the multiple orders of magnitude larger numbers of teenagers and adults who have not had their MMR, DTaP, etc. booster shots?
Over the last 20-plus years there have been e.g. Pertussis outbreaks roughly every 4-5 years and it's known to be caused, at least in part, by teenagers or adults whose vaccine-given immunity has worn off. Heck it wasn't until 2005 that the FDA even approved http://www.fda.gov/BiologicsBloodVaccines/Vaccines/ApprovedProducts/ucm142787.htm a Pertussis booster shot for adults even though it's been used in Europe for much longer (and it wasn't until last year that the FDA approved one for the over-65 set).
So why aren't you, those doctors and the media clamoring to prohibit adults from entering pediatrician offices without proof of up-to-date vaccinations of the adult?
As someone who had all their vaccines and still suffered through a bout of Pertussis as an adult (complete with signature please-save-me-from-drowning "whoop"), I still think you and TFA's doctors are complete idiots. A primary-care physician's office is going to be a soup of infectious germs and going to any pediatrician's office is pretty much always going to be comparable to connecting a computer with a freshly-installed copy of Windows 95 on the Internet.
Or age. There was a case in Philly where a bunch of infants died who were too young to get vacines from a mumps infected church full of retards.
In reading the article I could not see whether numbers were pulled from doctors that were in public or private practices. Private practice I can see them getting away with it, however not in public practice. This may be hard for those in metropolitan areas to understand, but many small towns and communities may only one doctor office (and a pure pediatric clinic can be around even less!). If the only pediatrician office is a public office and they turn kids away, I would think the ambulance chasing lawyers would be smacking their lips to get a piece of that action. I do believe most vaccinations are a worthwhile endeavor, but I just do not like the idea of doctors turning away a kid because of the decisions the parent makes.
Because it's the right thing to do?
~S
There's probably a medical reason for that too. I am not a medical biologist so frankly I have no idea what goes into making a vaccine, but I'm sure that while in many situations it might just be cheaper to use egg products in the vaccine productions, I'm willing to bet that there's at least a couple of vaccines that for whatever reason can't be produced with anything but egg products.
In a bit of shameless internet panhandling, I accept Litecoin Donations at Lbd2oH9QsthD1GfuUXPyka12YxvWJYnBVf
I'm tired of doctors insisting that my kid needs to be loaded up with 50 fucking vaccines at a time before the age of 2. I'm tired of doctors and nurses cornering my wife over it. I'm tired of doctors ignoring the fact that my kid's got immunity problems. That many vaccines would kill her. I'm tired of doctors that refuse to read charts, more than anything.
This signature has Super Cow Powers
But I don't think I could possibly be happy with medical treatment provided under the terms you've described. What would be your reaction if your endocrinologist told you, say, you had to give up having orgasms because it increased your risk of blindness at age 70 by 1%?
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
You assume that getting a vaccine means you get immunity. This is not true. Since vaccine efficacy is not 100%, herd immunity side effects are required to protect those that vaccine didn't work on (plus any vulnerable populations). Yes. A successful vaccine means immunity, but there's really no way to know if your vaccine was successful unless you get the disease or go through extensive extra tests. Also, immune systems are not binary, partial efficacy is possible as well, in which case herd immunity is an additional buffer to help protect you.
Finally, there's mutations and evolution of the diseases. Even if you're immune to a strain of disease, a population raging with the disease will quickly produce a strain that you are not immune to. Herd immunity helps to keep that spread and evolution of disease strains in check.
let me repeat: this is a bogus study.
"All other causes" is the sum total of every other disease that leads to death; including pneumonia, measles, mumps, malaria, hepatitis, HIV, drug abuse, etc. None of them are linked to vaccine-related death.
Quite the conjecture, considering the complete lack of empirical data to support it.
Where does the graphic specify which maladies that "all other causes" constitutes, and what evidence is given to support the claim that it does not include vaccine-related deaths? Oh, that's right. it doesn't, and there is none; you just arbitrarily decided what is and is not included, because to factually state that you do not know would run counter to validation of your assumption. That is politics, not science, my friend.
Thanks for playing.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
To a point - an egg allergy is reasonably common. So if this group can't get a vaccination and someone still manages to contract it, it will still spread among the non-vaccinated group. It is even possible that you can be a carrier and not actually be affected by some strains.
Unless there are vaccines that everyone can take we'll never be truly free of that kind of disease.
Actually the problem is the uneducated adults who refuse to keep their own vaccinations up-to-date, because the dramatic "rise"** is in the teenager/adult population http://www.clinicalcorrelations.org/?p=3951.
**A couple of older studies (that have become harder to find now that the FDA has approved stateside use of whooping cough boosters so I can't provide a link right now) made compelling cases that there has been little increase in whooping cough incidence over the last 40 years and that what has really happened is that physicians themselves have finally stopped believing the lie that whooping cough was nearly extinct and started considering it in their DDX. (aka they finally stopped believing that pertussis is a "zebra").
...why should I take even the tiny risk of having a vaccination to protect some idiot who refuses to get vaccinated...
Pot. Kettle. Black.
I live ze unknown. I love ze unknown. I am ze unknown.
You have it backwards: People with compromised or deficient immune systems CANNOT safely receive vaccines, thus the higher the concentration of vaccinated people around them, the safer they are. People who CHOOSE to remain unvaccinated increase the chances that the immunodeficient folks will be exposed to something nasty. You would punish those with conditions outside their control in order to accommodate those with conditions under their control.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled." Feynman
Being the parent of a son who recently was diagnosed with Autism gives me a perspective which I lacked before. I think the biggest issue here is that we have an autism epidemic the cause of which we have not been able to explain (1 in 91 children). Being human we have the urge to explain the unexplainable and when emotions are added to the mix, people start making irrational arguments. However, I personally see bad argument stemming from both the pro and anti-vaccine movements and I will not bore you with the details. I am well educated, well read and consider myself a fairly analytical person. If asked whether vaccines were the cause of my son's autism, my answer is always: "I don't know". However, I still have not seen a well-designed research study which includes high risk pockets of groups to make smaller and more likely correlations if any.
Having said all of that, following the herd is always dangerous especially if money and big interests are at play. I've had to fire 2 of those so called expert doctors because they lack the ability to listen to the parents and instead focus only on published research and statistics. In my camp parents still know their children best and not listening to them and shunning them out of the office is a poor way of handing an already highly charged emotional topic.
My few cents,
Rafi
WOW yourself. this report has been debunked for cherrypicked data and manipulation of the graphs.
They can be sued for poor performance reviews, if those reviews have anything false in them that's unrelated to the employees not receiving the vaccine. I.e., if the review says "bad employee because he did not take flu vaccine", that's fine, but if it says "bad employee because he didn't show up to work on time and had a bad attitude" when the only issue was refusing to take the vaccine, that's grounds for a lawsuit.
If you bothered to look, below the picture is a citation to CDC data, including a breakdown of infant mortality rate in the published peer-reviewed data.
I'm basing this off of my Masters Degree in Public Health and epidemiology classes. Not the arbitrary decision on my part; it's standard convention to add uncommon diseases to the catch-all "All Other Causes" heading defined as :
Back to the original topic, you think that somewhere buried in this heading is a pile of dead babies from vaccines, that somehow the entire health community has missed? Go on.
High maintenance clients may not be worth the burden. I
used to go into offices and review profitability. People would insist that client X was worth the trouble / time because they brought in so much business. We would break down the numbers, and the costs were always greater than people thought. Clients that tie up hours of your staff time – even if it’s “just the technician” are just pricey. About half the time the client was dropped. (Because, while some clients are huge burdens they still are worth it.)
God forbid that I should ever say this to a patient, as part of my introductory speech, no less. People that fail to manage their blood sugar, for whatever reason, need doctors too. Some people just can't quit smoking. Are there extra liabilities with these patients? Yes. If I wanted a liability-free career, I'd have done something else. It's my job to meet patients at their level and try to help.
But I guess if you only want 100% compliant patients in your practice, this is the way to go; there will always be somebody like me to treat the people that didn't meet your standards of rationality/intelligence/willpower/moral character.
Everyone getting vaccinated is only a nice thing as long as no dangerous vaccine is created by accident. There's no such vaccine today, what about tomorrow? A bad vaccine is how we got HIV/AIDS in the first place, so it has happened before and with the pharmaceutical industry being so closed to the outside world, I don't trust that a bad vaccine can't happen again.
And as you say, getting vaccinated for the benefit of others would be "nice". That doesn't mean it should be mandatory, nobody should be forced to put chemicals in their body for the benefit of others.
Your level of selfishness is shocking, in a free society.
While the main article read like an angry conspiracy theorist ("Oh no, the author of an article against vaccines actually believes what he is publishing!"), one of the comments actually did provide useful data. Mortality rates over time as more infant vaccines were introduced in the US. The complexities of data mining history make it so you cannot get clean answers about any single variable, but consistent reporting standards do provide a much more trustworthy data set than comparing the different definitions of "live birth" across continents.
You do realize that the first link in those search results is to a site that also features an article on how Bill Gates is behind chemtrails and the second link in that search is to InfoWars, right?
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled." Feynman
Do we get to curse $DEITY when that deity says no vaccinations?
Let me quote the same verses from a more modern yet literal translation, the NWT:
Only flesh with its soul--its blood--YOU must not eat. (Genesis 9:4)
This and other verses about "abstaining from blood" (e.g. Acts 15:29) are used by, for example, the Christian Congregation of Jehovah's Witnesses when they refuse transfusions of red and white blood cells. But are vaccines made from red and white blood cells? I thought they were made from weakened viruses.
YOU must not eat any body [already] dead. (Deuteronomy 14:21)
All this is saying is that scavenging is unsafe for humanity.
What! Do YOU not know that the body of YOU people is [the] temple of the holy spirit within YOU, which YOU have from God? Also, YOU do not belong to yourselves, / for YOU were bought with a price. By all means, glorify God in the body of YOU people. (I Corinthians 6:19,20)
I don't think getting a child vaccinated desecrates the temple of God's holy spirit. It prepares the immune system to fight off viral diseases that bring death. One might even argue that all viruses are ultimately Satan's fault, so it's the duty of every Christian to put on armor against them.
So the New York Times breaks down the 1%, and guess who a large chunk of the 1% so reviled is: Doctors. http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/newsgraphics/2012/0115-one-percent-occupations/index.html?ref=business Health isn't the issue, money is when it comes to vaccinations. I'll side with the countless intelligent moms and dads who are cautious, given the complexities of the issue over doctors needing to cover costs.
Just about every time we brought our son to our pediatrician, they'd ask if we wanted to take part in a new vaccine trial. For example the chicken pox vaccine apparently doesn't provide lifetime immunity and she told us our son would probably need a booster at some point in his teens but that they were offering us the opportunity to trial a new vaccine that was stronger. We said no and that the normal one was fine. They asked maybe four other times for other various vaccines and proceeded to tell us that vaccines are safe and there is no link to autism, etc. but that wasn't the problem, we had gotten all the other normal vaccines, we just didn't want our son being a guinea pig for their trials and we didn't appreciate them trying to cast us as anti-vaccine to pressure us. Finally we told them we weren't interested in taking part in any trials. This sort of reminded us that their is an active pharmaceutical industry trying to sell new products. While I appreciate the call to keep everyone vaccinated, I think its important to allow people the right to refuse their doctor's requests for whatever reasons.
Thank you for the thoughtful reply, but no, I don't assume that. I'm objecting to the "OMG the sky will fall if somebody doesn't get vaccinated" pseudo-argument, and the misuse of the concept of herd immunity in that context.
Anti-vaxxers are trying to skate on herd immunity, yes. Their presence does weaken the herd, if by "weaken the herd" you mean they increase the size of an existing vulnerable population. But they do not cause plagues, they do not cause healthy individuals to stop producing antibodies, and they do not increase the mutation rate of organisms.
There are several large non-vaccinating communities in my area (Old-Order Amish, among others) and they do endure regular, preventable epidemics. Those epidemics do not cause chain reactions into the vaccinated population. They just plain don't. These unvaccinated people interact with the rest of us all the time, and it does not destroy the herd or compromise the herd immunity. That's independently verifiable fact.
I vaccinated my children against quite a few diseases, but I read the Red Book entry and the manufacturer's data sheet on each one and researched them thoroughly first (their pediatrician was very helpful.) I did not give them the chicken pox vaccine because the version that was available at the time (preparations are changing constantly, for interesting reasons) was less reliable than sending them to play with a child that already had the pox.
My children play in the dirt and grass and sunlight and splash around in the creek. The children who do not do these things are probably more of a threat to world health than anti-vaxxers are. But my aunt died of post-polio complications (she got polio in the 1930s and was damaged all her life) so I am not an anti-vaxxer.
I think everyone wants the vax/antivax argument to be discretely binary, but it's really more of a nuanced continuum that has distinct issues relative to individual vaccine preparations, humans, and communities.
Your level of selfishness is shocking, in a free society.
How is anything I posted selfish? I have no known vaccine allergies and have already been vaccinated against anything likely to affect me. I'm the poster child of somebody who would agree with you if my only motivation were selfishness.
If you bothered to look, below the picture is a citation to CDC data, including a breakdown of infant mortality rate in the published peer-reviewed data.
And nowhere in the CDC page is it specified which maladies "all other causes" applies to.
I'm basing this off of my Masters Degree in Public Health and epidemiology classes.
What does that have to do with the fact you're presenting an assumption as fact, without empirical data to back it? As an academic, I would think you would know better than to make claims without having the dataset to back them. Guess there's more to education than the piece of paper you get at the end, eh?
it's standard convention to add uncommon diseases to the catch-all "All Other Causes" heading defined as :
"all causes of death that are ill-defined."
Such as... vaccine related deaths, perhaps? You're not doing yourself any favors by continuing to argue your point with vagaries, you know.
Back to the original topic, you think that somewhere buried in this heading is a pile of dead babies from vaccines, that somehow the entire health community has missed?
Unlike some people, I prefer to avoid making assumption; much to the contrary, I like to base my opinion and decisions off facts and logic. The fact is, you've yet to provide a single piece of evidence that actually supports your claim that there is no such thing as vaccination-related death, so logically, I have no cause to believe a word you say.
Just because I think you're full of it does not imply or infer any other opinion on any other topic; it just means I think you're full of it.
But hey, don't let that keep you from having a great day!
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
And amusingly, that link is *in* his link (sixth in line when I checked).
But it does make a good demonstration of an attempted echo chamber - if I just say it over and over and over again, maybe it'll become true!
Try bringing a new cat or dog into a veterinarian without proof of rabies vaccination. Unless it's an emergency, you might have to get the rabies vaccine first and come back later for the rest.
Yes most schools require it, but I believe you're allowed out of them for religious reasons which was the BS reason my uncle gave his son's school as to why they didn't have him vaccinated. (The real reason being they wanted an 'all natural' child. This poor kid got a concussion a few months ago and they refused to take him to the ER). School's aren't allowed to verify that one, and I imagine most parents who are against vaccines for stupid reasons use this get out of jail free card.
I have them here on my desk.
The shot makes extremely few sick, and NO ONE sick with the flu. That is NOT possible
few get sick even when the get the shot because :
A) The had already been exposed a few days prior to the vaccine
B) The get something beside influenza
C) Yes, sometimes it on'y [partial immunity because the strain is off. But it isn't that often and it certainly is a stupid reason not to get the shot.
"Vaccines only work if you irradicate the virus from the population"
Nope. If it's eradication the you no longer need the vaccine. Why do you think high level vaccination make things go away with time and not mutate?
"
Don't iradicate it, it mutates and your vaccine becomes useless AND your body can't do anything about it either."
COMPLETELY FALSE. Vaccinated people are NOT a vector for mutation. People who are not VACCINATED are a vector.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Taking a vaccine has a very small, unknown risk. Beyond the tinfoil hats of autistic conspiracy theorists, and the rare people who have known allergies, a few people who have a reaction to the vaccine. Some merely get very sick, other suffer permanent damage or die.
Herd immunization means that I have a very small chance of hitting one of these diseases, so I might rationally chose to forego vaccination.
Of course, if everybody makes that rational choice then herd immunization goes away. So we have a free rider effect. So we should encourage people to have the shots. That is, if one wants to opt out for a legitimate reason (allergies, religion) one can do so – but it should not be easy or the default option.
That's an incredibly bad 'study'. It takes a linear regression out of a bunch of dubious statistics and then purports to define a causal relationship.
Then it gets amped up in a rather histrionic blog who spends most of the time arguing a 'appeal to authority' rather than looking at the weak statistical inference.
Further, the reason that the US infant mortality stats suck has been well known - first, we have many more premature births than other countries (with better prenatal care) and second, there are lies, damned lies and statistics. The published lists of 'whose better' are typically done by the United Nations, whose members often have axes to grind and whose the data is supplied by the countries and is of course, subject to bias.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Was offered the hep a and b vaccines for years and declined them because of the things I'd heard about thimerosal, conspiracy theories and figured they're 3rd world diseases I'd never get. Wrong. Last september I started getting sicker and turned yellow. Turns out I'd contracted hep b. You get over it, but has it ever not been fun. A $12k hospital bill, at least two weeks off of work, numerout doctor visits, blood tests, hundreds of dollars per month in out of pocket costs for non covered supportive alternative medicine, in addition to conventional medicine copays...uh yeah. I wish I'd had the f-ing lousy shot, but was too well heeled to do it. You can shop at Whole Foods and you can eat organic and take whatever, but I highly recomend you take any vaccines for things you're (even slightly) at risk of contracting. My two cents. You can't go wrong avoiding pesticides and all that junk..the worst you can do is waste money, but oh can you ever go wrong declining a vaccine. My ass is baboon red from kicking myself.
Correlation is not causation.
Other studies indicate...
The infant mortality rate for non-Hispanic black women was 2.4 times the rate for non-Hispanic white women. Rates were also elevated for Puerto Rican and American Indian or Alaska Native women.
Increases in preterm birth and preterm-related infant mortality account for much of the lack of decline in the United States infant mortality rate from 2000 to 2005.
Seems to me that it's related to lack of access to healthcare than anything like vaccines. If I were to be generous, maybe it's giving vaccines to pre-term infants on the full-term infant schedule (perhaps we should be relying on herd immunity intially and delay vaccines for pre-term babies to match with their gestational age instead)... However who knows, unles syou do a study...
However, if you want to hear a rant about this topic, you can look here. I guess you can find anything on the internet these days (pro and con)....
And yet that could be said for millions of other reasons. Correlation doesn't mean causation, in for one of the few times I believe this is a case. I was vaccinated, my children are vaccinated, and I'm sorry, but if he is right, a few infant deaths (as devastating as it is) is better than a polio pandemic, etc. It's the best way to handle viruses at the moment.
WTF Slashdot, why do I have to login 50 times to post?
I'm going by a common epidemiological method of displaying data. You're getting hung up on something that a first-year epidemiology student already can solve. Please check a textbook; I'd give you a link but they aren't posted online except behind paywalls.
You are the one claiming there's some hidden number of vaccine deaths based on faulty correlation/causation claims. The burden is on you to prove it; rather than on me to try to prove a negative.
I never said there was "no such thing as vaccination-related death," indeed they do happen in rare cases; allergic reactions, attenuated vaccines reverting to wild-type, and liver reactions. During the swine-flu vaccinations in the 1970s there were cases of Guillian-Barre syndrome. They are all pretty rare, to the point where the CDC gets involved with most to see if there's any cluster or pattern. Factors like this are the reason the AMA and AAFP have broken from WHO guidelines and recommend the IPV (polio vaccine) rather than the more convenient OPV vaccine that the rest of the world uses. There were a small number of babies who developed polio and polio-like symptoms from the attenuated vaccine, prompting a switch to a less-effective and shorter-lasting but safer IPV instead.
There is a massive amount of surveillance for such a low-risk outcome. In the last few decades there's a huge wealth of vaccine mortality data in the medical journals. The few adverse reactions from vaccines are still less than the morbiditiy and mortality coming from the actual diseases. Again, I'd give you links to the actual research data but they are behind a paywall unless you have electronic access to a medical library (Perhaps I can suggest the Penn and Teller TV show "Bullshit" episode on vaccines, you can find it online easily). The data speaks for itself.
This is why I don't bother arguing with uninformed people on this topic, I get insults from people like yourself who think they know better than the experts because of google.
Because some vaccines are difficult to create on a large scale through certain methods. Furthermore, companies may hold patents on certain vaccine creation techniques, and are asking for sums that the vaccine producers find non-economical.
See here for a source: http://www.news-medical.net/health/Vaccine-Production.aspx
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Inconveniently for your contention, the higher mortality rate is due to other causes.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled." Feynman
who are just speeding up evolution in action. Seriously. Some dimwit with a degree from Phoenix "university" who works in human resources thinks he/she's competent to make a medical decision? I feel bad for the children, but stupidity is hereditary.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
That sounds like a good time to overrule those patents based on a public good policy. Hasn't that been done for other things?
Yet another example of why the patent system should be abolished or massively overhauled.
The problem is that when talking to anti-vaxxers, there is no winning. If you couch your language in the uncertainty inherent in research, they take from it that there's an obvious danger, and there's a conspiracy to keep the research results quiet, or to spin them to the advantage of Big Pharma. If you use everyday language to describe the overall result of the research, those people point to completely known risks with vaccines, and tell you that you don't know what you're talking about.
The biggest mistake they make though is that they've completely forgotten the very real dangers that mumps, measles and chickenpox represent. I won't even go into the details for polio. To them, measles is something you get over in a few weeks. They have no idea that even today, it can kill just as much as it did 100 years ago.
At some point, you just have to call them uneducated morons, and make sure that you keep as far away as possible from them.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
You are the one claiming there's some hidden number of vaccine deaths based on faulty correlation/causation claims. The burden is on you to prove it; rather than on me to try to prove a negative.
I made no such claim. I believe you are engaging in what psychologists refer to as "transferrence."
Your original post to which I replied:
Which of these can you blame on vaccines? None.
Looks like I'm not the one making claims, and thus have nothing that requires supporting documentation. I've merely been calling you out on your lack thereof, which you obviously have no intention of settling.
I will no longer be responding to your posts on this thread. To quote W.C. Fields,
Go away, kid, ya bother me.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
It has been, and yes, in my opinion vaccines is an area where patents should be overturned and/or completely overhauled. There is some precedent for the US government applying pressure to vaccine makers to not receive full price for their vaccines. But that does little to spur more competition in their supply.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Thank you for the thoughtful reply, but no, I don't assume that. I'm objecting to the "OMG the sky will fall if somebody doesn't get vaccinated" pseudo-argument, and the misuse of the concept of herd immunity in that context.
Anti-vaxxers are trying to skate on herd immunity, yes. Their presence does weaken the herd, if by "weaken the herd" you mean they increase the size of an existing vulnerable population. But they do not cause plagues, they do not cause healthy individuals to stop producing antibodies, and they do not increase the mutation rate of organisms.
Careful, while mutation rate doesn't increase, having lots and lots more organisms at the same mutation rate dramatically increases the actual number of mutations, and thus increases the chances of successful and viable mutations occurring. 10 organisms with a .5% mutation rate is different from 10 trillion organisms with a .5% mutation rate. And in a partially vaccinated population each of those mutations will have more opportunities to spread and thrive and test their mutations against vaccinated individuals.
There are several large non-vaccinating communities in my area (Old-Order Amish, among others) and they do endure regular, preventable epidemics. Those epidemics do not cause chain reactions into the vaccinated population. They just plain don't. These unvaccinated people interact with the rest of us all the time, and it does not destroy the herd or compromise the herd immunity. That's independently verifiable fact.
Again, be careful with your phrasing here. Herd immunity is precisely what prevents one vulnerable population from infecting other vulnerable populations. And there are researched immunity rates required to achieve effective barriers between vulnerable populations and individuals. Wikipedia has some numbers and references.
Considering that the success of any particular immunization is largely unknowable and the immunity rate needed to achieve effective herd immunity barriers is very vague, every individual that doesn't get immunized does but their large community at a very real risk.
Also consider those populations you talk about, particularly the Amish, are often very isolated. They do interact with the outside world, but those interactions area rare, and the chance of encountering someone else who is un-vaccinated while being sick themselves is very small. That's the very concept the idea of Herd Immunity is meant to convey. Once overall immunity drops to a certain point, that chance of spread increases dramatically. There's a number of neat animations that illustrate this, this one isn't the best I've seen but it was easy to find and it does its job.
Remember that even people that have been successfully immunized can and will become temporary members of the vulnerable population under many circumstances. Sick from other diseases that weaken the immune system, pregnancies, medical treatments that weaken the immune system, etc. There are also those people that do not have a choice (too young, allergies, other medical condition). So those people are the ones that are being put at risk when someone chooses not to vaccinate their children. It's especially bad at a doctor's office since that's where people take their kids when they get sick, and if they bump into kids waiting to get vaccinated, or who's vaccination didn't take, they've suddenly endangered more than just their own child with your decision. I'd be more OK with people refusing vaccines if they would voluntarily quarantine themselves when sick and there were criminal negligence charges available if they're decision affected anyone else.
I think everyone wants the vax/antivax argument to be discretely binary, but it's really more of a nuanced continuum tha
Neither of the authors of that study (one of whom has written for naturalnews.com) have expertise in epidemiology, vaccines, or science. They cherry picked one particular year to support their pet theory, plus countries collect infant mortality rate information in different ways, making comparisons difficult. They arbitrarily left some countries off the list as they would have contradicted their angle.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
If the Queen of England told you that there were aliens on Mars, would you believe her? That's basically all I am getting from reading this paper. Two people trying to be statisticians and looking like fools, it reads like something I would of written in undergrad. It doesn't address any of the confounding variables (socio-economic causes, SIDS, baseline health of the children, age of the mother, etc.) in a meaningful way besides brief mentions.
Not to mention even their statistics are shoddy, the Tukey-Kramer test is inappropriate for that data set (variance withing each group is NOT equal) so anything they did regarding grouping of vaccination ranges should be thrown out. And besides that all they did was a simple linear regression plotting IMR on vaccinations. That's it. They didn't try to do a different procedure to take into account SIDS, they just mentioned it without doing any statistical legwork to back up there claim that it was not important and threw in some quotes from anti-vaccine advocates.
So, I will point you to the previous post in which I gave you a list of similarly spurious regressions - this is no different than those. And then you can go take some basic statistics classes, read some REAL statistics papers and then maybe you will understand how FUCKING STUPID you look pimping this trash.
As someone already indicated to you, that study is bollocks.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
Those are admirable doctors.
For pretty much the same thing. We say you needed new servers two years ago, you said no. We recommended a software upgrade because your version is five years out of date, you said no. We told you it was silly to spend $5000 on iPads and then demand we get you apps for your five your old software, which won't work because iPad apps simply don't exist for your version, you refuse to do a version update, and that $5000 would have been better spent replacing your seven year old server!
There's only so much of this that even reasonable people can take before we suggest the client/patient kindly take his business elsewhere, ideally before the server crashes. (I think we left an apology note for whatever IT company took over that office on the desktop of the server. 'We're sorry. We tried to get them to listen. We really did.')
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
That's a 100% guarantee that the morons in question aren't going to listen to any other medically-sound, scientifically-proven advice, either.
Actually it's because it's the only realistic way to produce vaccines in the quantities required for general dissemination.
Eggs are effective and cheap, and available. Even if something else was theoretically as cheap on scale up, the reality is that we have billions of chickens and infrastructure for creating them today. As I understand it it was a huge breakthrough when the egg-production method was discovered since it meant it was very simple to roll out new vaccines.
HA! Nothing to do with compliance. Everything to do with Money. If the parents/patient refuse vaccination, the Doctors don't get paid (or at least the full amount due for services). Do You really think a Doctor is so concerned about a patients health that they would give up income because of it?
I wouldn't be surprised there is an angle from the insurance side. Perhaps they get a tax break or better pricing from pharmaceutials by pushing vaccination compliance on Doctors.
Since you clearly have never read the oath, here is the relevant line:
"I will apply, for the benefit of the sick, all measures [that] are required, avoiding those twin traps of overtreatment and therapeutic nihilism."
Since the patrinet parent will not allow the doctor to apply the measures needed, it's the parent not allowing the Dr,. to carry out their oath.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
vaccines are almost always a money looser for Doctors.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The possibility that there are enough of these idiots for herd immunity to be ineffective? I suppose that would play right into survival of the fittest though.
" and that's starting to change."
no, its not. There still, is no good studies that show alternative care works.
Hint: If it does work, then it becomes medicine.
"no-one's saying this kid is *forced* to get vaccinated"
I am. Assuming there isn't an allergy or immuno-compromised patient.
Do you know why we got rid of small pox? because we lined up every kid in a school, sent them to the gym, and they got there shots.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The problem is that they no longer receive care. These people are then causing other problems due to their general lack of care and lower quality of care than what would be provided by the aforementioned doctor.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
I'm sure the doctors are not concerned with the $10-15 per shot they would get
A few years ago a number of pediatricians and family practitioners were complaining that reimbursement for vaccines was below cost, not even including the expenses associated with storage or having a trained person give it. This is in the setting of unprecedented numbers of small practices going under because they can't generate a profit with the massive overhead (usually 1+ full-time employee) required to get meager reimbursements (often near cost).
If you couch your language in the uncertainty inherent in research, they take from it that there's an obvious danger,
Well, that's the honest truth.
and there's a conspiracy to keep the research results quiet, or to spin them to the advantage of Big Pharma.
If you fail to couch your language in the uncertainty inherent in research, then this is also true.
Show some numbers. Explain the horror of the disease. Be honest about the chances of catching it, particularly regarding circumstances: rural, suburban, urban, more or less isolated, country, state, socioeconomic background, etc. Be honest about the chances of adverse reactions... and no, the 24-hour cut-off is not honest.
Mercury is bad for you and it is in vaccines. Look at the ingredients label that is right on the vaccine.
The Official Site of 1337 Pwnage
this is a case of 'if you don't help me pull money in, i don't want to help you, regardless'.
money is still king in healthcare, and probably always will be.
i like the doctors who care, not doctors who in it to just for a career and money.
Certainly there is.
First of all, it pressures the clueless to do the right thing; the doctor knows more than they do, count on it. Best case, they change their mind because they like the doctor or the service they get from the doctor.
Secondly, if they maintain their rejection of proper health care, these people would take up more office time than they deserve to because they don't adequately take care of themselves, thus reducing the amount of time and care the doctor can give to responsible people -- better to have the habitually health-ignorant at home rooting around in their homeopathy and chiropractic books than taking up time sensible people need to get decent healthcare.
Third, some number of the rejected, hopefully, will die, become sterile, or experience changes to the point where they are no longer interesting as a mate due to the consequences of their idiocy, thus strengthening the human race by culling the genetic pool of some cluetards.
Several decades ago, we all got our vaccine jabs one at a time spread out over several years. Parents bitched about their child getting stuck repeatedly, crying, etc. so the vaccine companies started combining the vaccines together, like MMR. Then someone decided children need all of their vaccines as soon as possible, so they start giving them before they leave the hospital and sometimes give multiple combined injections in a single visit. Many neurological pathways are still developing in the first 24 months and science hasn't definitively concluded that vaccines don't cause neurological problems. I don't have a problem with the concept of vaccines, but I do have a problem following some supposed expert's schedule of vaccines when they can't show why the accelerated schedule is necessary...it certainly wasn't necessary in the early days of vaccination. Likewise, why give a combo vaccine when you can spread it out. Doctors lose sight of this when the parent doesn't want to follow the "recommended" schedule - they tell the patients stick to the schedule or get lost for fear that they will get sued for malpractice if the child catches something. Sometimes, the doc's just get pissed that you're questioning their "great knowledge"...as if they know 100% of absolutely everything there is to know about medicine. For me, anti-vaccine people are a little out there...but don't lump me and others into that category when we agree with vaccination, but just not the schedule.....................And as far as physician comp is concerned, I've valued hundreds of physician practices for sale. The doc's who don't make a lot of money have poor business practices. I just reviewed a Internal Medicine doc's practice who was taking home $350k....that's 95th percentile. Business savvy, and a hard worker. Don't let the crybaby doc's boo hoo you into thinking they don't make a very comfortable living. In my opinion, they're overpaid. I have a bill from an office visit to a pediatrician from 1970...when you adjust for inflation, it comes to $40. A typical level 2 or 3 visit is reimbursed at $50 - $85. I know, they like to pull out the time value of the money they're not earning while in school and the cost of school, etc. That's a load of crap. You choose medicine because you like it. If you're only in it for the money, none of your patients want you "practicing" medicine on them. Go to a state school for undergrad and maybe be in debt $20k. Go to a state school for medicine and rack up another $100k. I'll round up to $150k to make everyone happy. There shouldn't be any debt in residency, because residents make about $50k and you can live off of that. So once you're out, you making at least $125k and if you live like normal non-physician people, you can pay off your $150k in school loans in 3 years while living comfortably on $75k.
Amazingly, it even gets worse than that. I know a Dr. that often does work as a medical expert in court cases. In one case a family refused vaccination, were educated about the risks, and signed a very strongly worded consent form including being aware that their child may face death or serious illness as a result of not being vaccinated. One of the children went on to contract a disease that the vaccines were designed to prevent and sued. Who do you think won? The family did of course, because the Dr. didn't try hard enough to educate the family about the risks. What exactly should they do, spend their entire day trying to convince people that won't listen anyway?
Whoever came to that asinine decision should be sentenced to spend even just a single week trying to education nutter non vaxxer moron parents about why they should get their children vaccinated. In ten minutes they'd cry uncle at the unending stupidity of the non vaxxers and how unwilling they are to listen to any reason. Somehow they are all convinced by completely unscientific arguments that they all bandy about amongst themselves and will listen to nothing else.
So the result is non vaxxers will increasingly get fired by mainstream primary care physicians and there will certainly be plenty of quacks willing to tell them what they want to hear and take their money. The problem is it's the children that suffer not the parents. The children will get lower quality care. I think it will take nothing less than a widespread pandemic to change the situation and that may not be enough to change the minds of non vaxxers. It will probably take defining vaccine refusal as child neglect to actually fix the problem.
Nice nickname btw
Is there a vaccine for colds, broken bones, cancer, heart attacks, strokes, car accidents...?
Because if there isn't, it sounds like doctors still have plenty to do.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Chlorine is also incredibly bad for you and if you ate a big enough chunk of sodium you would die. Together they make the salt in your food.
The mercury in some vaccines and in dental amalgam is not in a pure elemental form that can poison you.
WTF is it will all this luddite bullshit here lately?
I would love to have more clients who completely disregard my advice. People who sign contracts without reading them, people who blab their hearts out to the police and who consent to searches, people who drink and drive over and over and over again. Clients like these are my bread and butter. What's not to like?
So clearly Orking Cows means to bring geisser to cattle.
Obviously.
(Oh, and watch out for aufhocking.)
What exactly is Orking a Cow?
"In 2005, an outbreak of 34 measles cases in Indiana were traced back to a group of parents who didn't vaccinate their children, according to a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine."
And currently, there's a measles outbreak happening in Indiana following the superbowl festivities earlier this month, that can probably be linked back to some misguided parents and their half-baked theories about vaccination.
-Jamman
True, and if the doctor give the child the Chicken Pox vaccine, they will be increase the risk of death 10 fold, but by the time the kid dies, he will no longer be in that doctor's care. Double win!
if you have bothered to sift through 1000+ previous posts then you may be disappointed by my lack of related content. Mod me up Scotty!
There was an unknown error in the submission.
I have no problems with vaccination. I've also benefited from eye surgery.
However, I've also been treated horribly at the hands of MDs, from a simple case of tendonitis that was made exponentially worse by incompetent quacks who, instead of treating the source of the problem, pushed pharmaceuticals that had been rushed through the FDA approval process and were later taken off the market for potentially fatal side-effects I experienced. Then there was another eye doctor who didn't know the difference between near-sighted and far-sighted, also the sadistic fuck who ripped the skin off my penis shortly after I was born in order to prevent blindness, epilepsy, and who knows what other discredited nonsense.
The science of vaccination does not bother me. However, the greed, ignorance, and impulsiveness of the American medical system worries me quite a bit. Anti-vaccers are victims of misinformation, but the medical industry does precious little to build and retain trust, relying on arrogance and authoritarianism.
When the industry no longer tolerates inhumane treatment of patients, the patients will trust the doctors.
Fuck that shit. Everybody is a selfish dick, and that's a good thing. It prevents us from collapsing into a self-destructive mass of empathetic losers. I wonder if you remember that commercial about saving the starving children of Africa for less than the price of a cup of coffee. It's the same bullshit. Why aren't you giving a dollar a day to that charity? (Oh, are you? Well one dollar is nothing, why aren't you giving two?) And there's this other charity that should get at least five. And so on.
We're talking about certain death for millions of children a year, compared to a chance of illness and a smaller chance of death for a tiny number of children who can't get vaccines themselves. So which one makes you more of a selfish dick?
It's an invalid argument. If all you've got is "you're selfish" then you lose, because yeah, people are selfish, including you.
I agree, but it certainly wouldn't be "a large portion of our house of cards" -- we're talking a tiny proportion of the population who legitimately can't get vaccines.
And the children who can't get vaccines should be treated exactly the same as the children whose parents choose not to vaccinate them with respect to things like whether they're allowed in public school or whether a doctor "fires" them. Anything else is legislating morality rather than looking at objective results.
Because willfully endangering other people to eliminate a tiny, tiny risk of discomfort to yourself
If the only risk of taking a vaccination was a small discomfort you might have a point. However vaccinations are not risk free - the risk of significant complications is incredibly low but NOT zero. So again I ask why is it reasonable to ask someone to take on this small, but non-zero risk for no benefit to themselves in order to protect someone refuses to take the same tiny risk themselves despite the fact that it would actually benefit them?
Reread the post - I'm referring to the specific case where one person is immune to the nasty effects of the disease e.g. rubella causing birth defects and so suffers no benefit from the vaccination themselves. In the case where the patient themselves would benefit from the immunity then the reason for doing it is that they, themselves, benefit from the immunity.
Some medical issues really do involve a tragedy of the commons. One is vaccination. Another big one is antibiotic use.
I disagree. Overuse of antibiotics is bad for everyone, including the patient who is taking the antibiotics because later in life they will likely need effective antibiotics. Vaccinating a section of the population who does not need to be vaccinated because the complications of the disease do not apply to them offers no benefit to them.
As far as I can tell egg in vaccines applies primarily only to the flu vaccine and, even then, there are alternatives. However even then I would still argue that it is unethical for a doctor to advise a patient undergo a medical procedure with a non-zero risk for the sole benefit of others. By all means ask them to volunteer - there are plenty of example of living organ donation, bone marrow etc - but advising them that they should undergo a medical procedure which does not benefit the patient is unethical.
I'm sure that the huge spike in ADD & autism has nothing to do with the increase in vaccinations or the fact that those conditions often first develop coinciding with the vaccinations. And all the studies that have suggested this aren't real science because slashdot readers know which studies are valid and which should be dismissed.
Sounds like most if on here are of status quo, unreal I expect more from slashdot.
Doctors have an oath to serve, if they are worried of lawsuits then they should create a waiver form that patients must sign "I Dr. _________ suggested _________ vaccines and _____ ______ refused this waiver is proof that I Dr. __________ offered and warned of said dangers from non-vaccine. If there is an issue with a patient with a possible contagious disease then a doctor should visit the patient at there home to keep the disease from spreading to those who may or may not have the proper vaccines.
Fuck Doctors debt over college bills, they know what they were getting into to when they picked there profession..
Doctors seem to do the same bitchin and whining cops do when they get called out on something silly, "I got better things to do with my time" really sitting a cop car driving around all day is your idea of better things to do? Did you think you were going to become Dirty Harry and single handily take out a group of bank robbers a daily basis you idiot. This is your job... You dont like it go become an engineer !!
They became doctors to make big money not to care about people, it has been this way since the start of modern medicine.. Or they hope or inspire to create some new surgery to become famous and make boats loads of money.. The doctors that do care and got into it for that reason are few and far between.
You go in for one thing and come outwith 10 other things that pose no real danger to you health or can easily be fixed by having a proper diet. But they push for you to go on pills instead. The medical industry in the US has become laughable, and un trusting so people should become paranoid over a vaccine, the media and medical industry with there goons still have not given out a simple yes or no on what vaccines contain, let alone the hundreds of new drugs that they keep giving out which has only fueled more infection and un seen health problem, that does not mean a doctor should tell them to fuck off because they refuse a vaccine.
I am not an ass kisser for doctors, they have there options, and a patient should there's. So they can go to someone else, and the doctor can find someone else to make his or hers commissions off of.
So the OP is an infant? I'm betting he's had more than a few vaccines if he's already posting here at such an age.
Get a better doctor.
Look harder. Oh, never mind, you wouldn't be able to afford a good doctor. It's a shame you don't live in a first world country, otherwise you'd be able to go to the best doctors, regardless of your lack of any money.
You CAN get real polio from the vaccine.
The Sabin "attenuated virus" vaccine is problematic in low-incidence countries because the chance of getting polio from the vaccine is higher than getting polio otherwise. It also exposes people who did not give informed consent to the vaccine-virus.
This is why Salk-type vaccines, who do not have these problems, are used for child immunizations in most low-incidence countries.
I vaguely recall [a measles outbreak] in a nearby state that killed nearly 700 people.
Measles has a mortality rate of ~ 1: 1000 in developed countries. Assuming you live in the USA and that it counts as a developed country. 700 deaths would amount to about 700K people ill in just one state.
As of 26 August 2011 198 cases of measles had been confirmed in the entire USA. This is the highest number of cases since 1996. I believe the total number climbed a bit later on to slightly over 220, but that's quite far from the 700 people you remember _dying_.
Wow, you are such a brain dead moron. You posted this retarded shit in a thread that's pro your moronic stance.
And that's exactly what a lot of people are doing here, when they want others to get e.g. the flu shot, to avoid risking a few days in bed for themselves.
I would like to see all docs refuse to see patients that refuse to get their vaccines.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Still waiting for ANYBODY on the planet to rebut anything Dr Hadwen said on this subject:
http://www.whale.to/v/hadwen1.html
Oral vaccination stopped because its risk outweigh the benifit for countries that are (almost) polio-free. The oral vaccine constists of a virus that is able to replicate in the gastrointestinal tract, but not in neurons. It can revert and cause full-blown polio in the vaccinated individual and (through shedding) other insufficiently protected people.
is this 'idiots' parade day' on slashdot ?
You know, I was thinking the same thing...it does look like an idiot parade around here. But then I looked a bit more carefully and realized it was just you posting the same stupid link over and over and over and over and over and over and over.
No, YOU pick another website. If you can't be bothered to pick even a slightly-trusted source for information, then you either have something to hide, or are lazy. Either way I doubt I'll be looking to you for medical advice.
They use live chicken embryos (eggs) to grow the flu virus to manufacture flu vaccines. There's still a lot of egg protein left after they process the virus for the vaccine. Since influenza is an avian virus, this makes sense. You could use a human host to grow your virus, but then you'd risk transmitting a whole host of other diseases. Chickens don't have a lot of diseases in common with people.
They used to use human passage to create the vaccine for smallpox (transmitting the vaccinia virus). They figured out that this caused other diseases to get transmitted. Using cows to grow the virus greatly reduced the risk, so they outlawed using the human derived virus for vaccination.
Originally all vaccines were done using live, attenuated or killed virus that was grown in a living host organism. These days viruses are increasingly grown in cell culture or antigenic epitopes are cloned and grown in recombinant cell cultures. These techniques will have fewer contaminating host proteins, reducing the risk of unintended allergic response.
There are religions that forbid vaccines. Who are you to tell people what religion to follow?
Also, some vaccines, like the flu vaccine, are only made with eggs.
Switch to FluMist (nasal spray flu vaccine), it's produced using a cell-culture process and is completely egg-free. There might be some other brands now too, not sure as it's been a little while since I last worked in the influenza vaccine business.
Last year when there was the final nail in the coffin of the fraud of the medical doctor who said that vaccines caused autism my youngest had his 3 month shots and checkup. So while the doctor was checking him out I started talking to him about the vaccine "issue". At first he thought I was one of the nut job anti-vaccine people as they are the only ones who typically ask about vaccines but I think he was pleased that I wasn't after the discussion got started. One of the more interesting things I found out was that the state of Minnesota tracks and scores doctors, especially pediatricians. One of the important factors that the state uses is percentage vaccinated and that a number of pediatricians were starting to refuse patients who would refuse to have their children vaccinated because it would lower their score which I guess has some effect on their reimbursement rate from the state. He also mentioned that he didn't turn anyone away even the anti-vaccination patients because for a number of his patients he was the only pediatrician near by and their kids wouldn't get any medical services if he turned them away. He still tries to convince each of the anti-vaccination patients that they really should be vaccinated but said it is difficult when you have celebrities like Jenny McCarthy, Oprah (a real powerhouse in shaping women's opinion) and others saying the exact opposite. I guess this is why celebrity endorsement works in advertising.
I have also seen people in this thread mention that public schools won't allow a kid in who hasn't had their vaccines. The truth is they will but it takes some doing and they really want all kids to be properly vaccinated for the reasons mentioned elsewhere in this thread. It is the state that sets these requirements so it takes a waiver from the state to get out from under them. Also schools are breeding grounds for disease, the kids are like little filthy plague rats
Time to offend someone
Pathogens mutate all the time. They can't mutate in a vaccinated population because they don't have the opportunity to reproduce anywhere. An unvaccinated person is a walking lab for pathogens to experiment until they've mutated enough to overcome vaccination.
As an example, the influenza virus mutates all the time, hence last year's vaccine is useless now.
Riiiiight. Sure.
You sound like an anti-vacciner trying to make up a story to justify your batshit beliefs.
I says this because in a world where malpractice insurance payments are crushing doctors and malpractice suits are simply ruining them, you are telling us that your doctor wants to gets sued. In fact he will kick you out of his practice unless he gets a chance to have a career ruining lawsuit.
Are you leaving out something? Maybe that the vaccines he wants to use have no egg base? maybe you says your kid is highly allergic but medical science and testing say he is not?
In the end doctors do not go around knowingly injecting their patients with things they are "highly allergic" to, just to watch them hit anaphylactic shock and die on the floor, for the LULZ.
Your example is very good.
Influenza is believed to mutate primarily in its alternate hosts, not in humans. Ducks and pigs, I think? Hmmm, medline says yes.
See Source for influenza pandemics by C. Scholtissek (Institut fur Virologie, Justus Liebig Universitat, Giessen, Germany) for example.
Even if you eliminate all pathogens without alternate hosts, you will still have no shortage of ever-mutating diseases that we humans are susceptible to.
The raw fact is that unimmunized individuals are not the source of epidemics among vaccinated populations. These vast plagues people are claiming are caused by anti-vaxxers simply do not exist, because herd immunity is not significantly impacted by the existence of anti-vaxxers. It's just a fairy story to demonize people who don't trust the pharma industries.
I type psychological evaluation transcripts. I can predict a client's major (disabling) symptoms with about 80% accuracy before arriving at that part of the report, because the list of drugs comes first - and I know what their major side effects are. Not relevant to the vaccination issue, but it says a LOT about the nature of medical science driven by pharmaceutical company research, grants, and sponsorship of publications.
In re vaccination, not all vaccines are created equal. The smallpox vaccine is not a vaccine against smallpox - it is a vaccination against cowpox, which happens to train the immune system to kill smallpox at no extra charge. The reputation of vaccines rests on this unique and unrepeatable case.
There is substantial evidence that the Salk polio vaccine actually works, and several others as well. There is no evidence that flu vaccines work - yes I said NO evidence. The best that can be said for them is that they do not measurably increase mortality, either. Distilled water would be equally effective as well as being cheaper and safer - as long as the recipient believes it will work. Flu vaccines are faith based medicine, a VASTLY profitable swindle propped up by the reluctance of researchers to bite the hand that feeds them grants.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/11/does-the-vaccine-matter/7723/
Your own search link includes a proper analysis of why the claim is at best specious and more accurately a flat out lie:
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/vaccine-schedules-and-infant-mortality-a-false-relationship-promoted-by-the-anti-vaccine-movement/
do no harm. wouldn't hurt to air all the facts of the situation. doctors circling the wagons doesn't help the flow of information
No it doesn't:
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/vaccine-schedules-and-infant-mortality-a-false-relationship-promoted-by-the-anti-vaccine-movement/
False claim, debunked by critical thinker:
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/vaccine-schedules-and-infant-mortality-a-false-relationship-promoted-by-the-anti-vaccine-movement/
"child mortality rate goes up in proportion to number of vaccinations per country."
No it doesn't:
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/vaccine-schedules-and-infant-mortality-a-false-relationship-promoted-by-the-anti-vaccine-movement/
I used influenza as a good example of how much pathogens can mutate, you cherry pick this virus and try to extrapolate to all pathogens its ability to survive in non-human hosts.
You come here defying herd immunity, a subject that has been widely studied by scientists, and try to fight it with a bunch of naive prejudicial bullshit. If you want to fight a scientific theory, at the very least you should read something about the subject.
Your nick matches your attitude pretty well. for someone claiming that he's not an anti-vaxxer, you surely try hard to defend their cause.
One person might be highly allergic to eggs and might not be able to get some particular vaccine as a result. However, if everybody around them isn't allergic to eggs wouldn't it be nice if they were vaccinated, thus greatly reducing the chance that any of them will get sick?
But "wouldn't it be nice" is not a good enough reason to take away people's liberty to do what they want with their own bodies.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
Your claim is not scientifically sound:
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/vaccine-schedules-and-infant-mortality-a-false-relationship-promoted-by-the-anti-vaccine-movement/
First off I am NOT anti-vax. Vaccines got rid of smallpox and saving 3 million lives a year is a huge accomplishment. My kids are vaccinated but ONLY for the serious stuff. Seasonal flu vaccine? You must be kidding. We are allowing a great medical tool (vaccines) to be used for everything and sold as "they best way" when in a lot of cases it isn't. Just like with antibiotics, overuse will cause us huge problems now and in the future.
If the doctors don't want people rejecting vacinations for serious stuff (measles, whooping cough, etc) then quit promoting the stuff that doesn't work well like pushing the seasonal flu vaccine. I feel for the doctors because the predicament they are in is huge. They have limited time and have a big bullseye marked on them by the pharmaceutical companies who constantly lobby them.
If you think seasonal flu vaccine works you really need to educate yourself. There is a great site called www.cochrane.org where doctors and researchers evaluate medical interventions (not just vaccines). The lack of quality on the seasonal flu vaccine is appalling.
- Cochrane Review - Vaccines for preventing influenza in healthy adults
http://summaries.cochrane.org/CD001269/vaccines-to-prevent-influenza-in-healthy-adults
That is but one example. They have more on the site for healthy children, old folks and lots more. I highly recommend it. I also recommend everyone look into the work of Dr Lisa Jackson who's work clearly showed the "healthy user" effect is responsible for most, if not all, the benefits ascribed to the seasonal flu vaccine.
In the end the doctors have brought this on themselves because they just repeat the mantra they have been told without looking into the facts. I know their time is limited but so do those who target them. If you tell everyone to get the seasonal flu vaccine and they find out it doesn't work then why would they trust your judgement for the more serious stuff?
Vaccines are being pushed heavily by the large pharmaceutical companies not because they work better than the alternatives but because they can't be sued! They have lot $15 BILLION in fines, settlements and lawyer fees in the last dozen years. Once on the approved list they can't be sued. Follow the money.
The way it works in our area is you fill out the entrance paperwork saying "Doctor B.Honeydew is our pediatrician", even if you've never spoken to the doc. Pediatricians will not schedule the visit in advance, the hospital notifies them that a new parent has requested them and the doc stops by to say hi.
So three years ago we're sitting in the maternity ward with a brand new baby, trying to do everything right. The doc's assistant (not the doctor) comes in and wakes us up to say hello, asks if we have any questions. Groggy and sleep deprived, I asked something like "there's a lot of questions about a link between vaccines and autism, what are your thoughts?" I believe we got the standard there-is-no-link, herd-immunity answer.
Fast forward 7 days, we call to schedule his first real checkup with the doctor. The office says "oh, Doctor Nimrod decided that you were not a good fit for our practice, you will need to find a different pediatrician". They would not put the doctor on the phone, his responses were relayed to us through his receptionist.
WTF!@$!@ Oh crap we have a brand new baby and no doctor!! Cue the terror and panic attacks from new mommy.
After some frantic phone calls we found a fantastic doctor that my son loves, and who was appalled by how the first doctor treated new parents without even speaking to them. My son is healthy and happy, and yes he's fully vaccinated. But if I could have reached through the phone and strangled that first doctor for putting my wife through that, I would have.
Study everything, you'll find something you can use - Jason Bourne
Why would people risk not immunising against a killer illness over the fictional risk of catching a genetic illness? It's clearly the parents who make these decisions who need removing from the gene pool, and not the kids. I have seen what some childhood immunizable illnesses can do to some people, if they are lucky they die.
Here we are in complete agreement!
But the Harvard animation uses a flawed paradigm, which is also shown in this statement of yours:
This is false. Interaction is daily on an very large scale. I live right between two large Amish communities (near Dover & Avondale, respectively) that depend on the "English" for commerce. I see them almost every single day and actually touch their unvaccinated flesh at least once a week. We breathe the same air, and handle the same money.
One of the reasons I am comfortable with the presence of large unvaccinated communities is because they represent a scientific control - a group that empirically tests the claims made by amoral actors like for-profit vaccine vendors. And empirically, the oft-repeated claim that anti-vaxxers are going to doom us all appears to be nonsense.
Get vaccinated, yes. Round up the anti-vaxxers and forcibly innoculate them? No. You have to draw a line somewhere.
I never said herd immunity is bullshit. READ WHAT I WROTE and stop putting words in my mouth!
I said claiming herd immunity will fail if we don't start oppressing anti-vaxxers is a bullshit argument.
And YOU cherry-picked influenza as an example, not me. Don't blame me that it supports my point more than yours.
100% agree!
But - do you think that everything you just said will cease to be true if we don't deny medical care to anti-vaxxers?
Because that's what this argument is about. The claim that herd immunity will be destroyed "like a house of cards" by the presence of anti-vaxxers. I objected to that claim and now I'm getting a torrent of abuse from self-appointed champions of vaccination. (Er, I do not include you in that category, since you offered no such abuse, apologies).
Probably for the same reason they didn't want to eliminate mercury, and once the autism link was disproved the mercury came back. It's cheaper to produce something that works for 80% of the population, even if that harms 5% of the population (and realistically, for most vaccines it's not even 5% - it's far less than 1% that actually take harm).
I think it's because monetary profit is more important to the vaccine vendors than assuaging people's fears. So, we are going to have anti-vaxxers acting based on fear.
And that's OK with me... as long as neither group is pretending to be Mother frickin' Teresa saving the world. I understand Big Pharma needs to make profit to continue to operate. I understand people have to do what they think best for their children.
It's just not a problem that needs any intervention stronger than simple education.
Yes, OK, I would only point out that those groups aren't being put at risk by the unvaccinated - they are being prevented from enjoying a certain protection, rather. Sort of like how not having a wealthy senator for a father prevents me from enjoying protection from DUI tickets, eh? I don't know if I stated that very well, I hope you get it.
The source of the risk is nature, evolution, and the way the universe works. The source of the protection is herd immunity. The groups you mentioned aren't having something taken from them, they are being prevented from enjoying the benefits of something, and the anti-vaxxers are voluntarily becoming a part of that unprotected group.
I don't want my children in that group, so they've had a fair number of vaccinations. But it would not be a criminal act for me to refuse. It would just be stupid.
I never said herd immunity is bullshit. READ WHAT I WROTE and stop putting words in my mouth!
False. I recall a previous post from you:
I have seen nothing that makes me believe "vaccines rely on herd immunity". .
. .
I don't know where this idea you have got started, but it's like a meme now... people just repeat it without evidence all the time.
I said claiming herd immunity will fail if we don't start oppressing anti-vaxxers is a bullshit argument.
If the anti-vaxxer stupidity spreads enough, it will indeed fail. But don't bother backing your arguments with data. Who reads that shit?
And YOU cherry-picked influenza as an example, not me. Don't blame me that it supports my point more than yours.
Since we are cherry-picking, I can cherry-pick Variola, which disappeared due to a successful worldwide vaccination campaign.
I don't think "educating" people by telling them, "there's a 1-in-50 chance your kid is going to have a big problem with this vaccine, but don't worry about that because this lets big Pharma companies make more profit than by doing something to reduce that number to 1-in-1000, and it's more important that they make more money even if that means your kid gets the short end of the stick", is going to do much to alleviate the anti-vaxxer phenomenon.
The Sabin vaccine can spread by being shed in feces, but this is the first time I've heard of that called a feature of design.
Your point is still valid whether Sabin intended it or not, though. Very interesting, thanks!
I stand by the statements you quoted.
And I reject your interpretation of them.
How, exactly, does withholding medical care from the unvaccinated cause "anti-vaxxer stupidity to spread?"
I think approaching the problem as an excuse for a fight, and demonizing your opponents, is more likely to have that effect. Think about it, eh?
Yeah, that's not the way to go. Even though the numbers are really a lot lower than that for most vaccines... if your only child was one of the ten kids Wikipedia says died from the Salk vaccine, that's 100% of your sample.
I usually work on the categorical imperative as my answer to anti-vaxxers. If you can get people to accept that they have a moral responsibility to other humans, you can build on that.
So I wonder what the real numbers are (i.e., what are your chances of a problem with today's crappy vaccines, vs. what are your chances if the pharma companies weren't cutting corners).
If the industry wants to get more people to use vaccines, the least they could do is make them better so that fewer people have reactions or problems, instead of merely calling them "acceptable casualties". Obviously, you can't make them perfect, but when they're not even bothering to try, it just makes the whole system look bad, and gives the antir-vaxxers plenty of ammunition.
I agree it is an ethical dilemma. If I enact a given healthcare policy it will result in n people dying who would be unlikely to have died without it, but will save 100n people. Is that ethical?
I'm not convinced that it is always unethical to force somebody to do something not in their interest for the sole benefit of others. That's basically the entire principle behind socialism, which a significant portion of the world's population supports. I'm not sure that sticking needles into people is all that much different from taking their money.
But "wouldn't it be nice" is not a good enough reason to take away people's liberty to do what they want with their own bodies.
How about saving lives? Is that a good enough reason?
Basically the fundamental issue is socialism, whether applied to medicine or finances. If you don't like socialism, then you won't like forced vaccination. If you like socialism, then you probably won't be against forced vaccination (at least not for the reasons you suggest - many oppose vaccination for perceived health reasons).
Some of the numbers are difficult. Take mercury, for example - if the only exposure your kid has to mercury is a couple doses of vaccine, it's not going to do anything. But mercury exposure is cumulative, and damage persistent. So most parents want to try for zero mercury exposure in their children, just to give them more headroom in the case of an accidental ingestion of bad fish or whatever, and they see no problem in paying more for vaccines without mercury. But the vaccine vendors successfully lobbied for a return of mercury based on fear-mongering about hypothetical bird flu epidemics... and fear seems to sell these days. This whole thread is about fear... the anti-vaxxers fear of vaccine toxicity, and the anti-anti-vaxxers fears of vaccine ineffectiveness (thus their obsession with herd immunity).
I dunno what the answer is, frankly. But I'm really fed up with the fear mongering.
Well as an engineer, I'd fed up with half-assedness, and it sounds a lot to me like that's one of the big problems here: companies don't want to do anything to hurt profits, so if they can use a formulation that costs less but ends up hurting more people, they're perfectly fine with that, and our government (which is supposed to be in the business of protecting public health) does nothing about it.
Back in the day a vaccine was something that protected the individual from a disease. It was a one-to-one relationship: take it and stay well. Then came the bullshit artists who created vaccines that only work if everyone takes them. We now need a law that says a fucking doctor has to treat you like a customer instead of a fucking pet!!!
No, I don't think it's okay to take away people's liberty to save lives.
I agree with you that the issue is socialism, and I don't like socialism.
Just on a whim, where do you come down on the abortion debate?
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
Parents who refuse vaccines for their children without a goddamn good reason should have their children taken away. After all, if they're refusing vaccines, what other routine medical care are they withholding?
Fuck that shit. Everybody is a selfish dick, and that's a good thing
You can always spot the Americans in these arguments. They all sound like an angsty 13-years-old whose older brother has just tried to read Ayn Rand.
(DISCLAIMER: I did not mean to directly offend you or your family by implying that someone related to you has *actually* tried to read a book)
How, exactly, does withholding medical care from the unvaccinated cause "anti-vaxxer stupidity to spread?"
This is a straw man. When did I exactly say that?
It's not just "red and white blood cells" it's also plasma and platelets.
Which is where I have found that my conscience differs from WTS doctrine. I did my own interpretation of "the life is in the blood", and I failed to see how platelets and plasma count as "the life".
We're not really sure if bacos count as bacon, so that's okay
By the same analogy, vegetarian pseudo-bacon products such as Betty Crocker's Bac-Os would correspond to blood expanders.
It actually begins "abstain from food sacrificed to idols." And is THAT an all-encompassing edict for all times? No. In 1 Corinthians 8, Paul states that an "idol is nothing in the world" and that eating food offered to idols is actually perfectly OKAY.
Wow. Just wow. My brother is a baptized JW, and I'll have to bring up that chapter to him. Thank you.
OK, look, the topic of this thread is doctors refusing medical care for the unvaccinated.
The topic of this sub-thread is whether the human population is going to be "substantially" damaged "like a house of cards" because of anti-vaxxers. I am taking the position that herd immunity does not work that way, and that therefore this is not a valid reason to oppress anti-vaxxers. Herd immunity is simply a statistical emergent property that won't suddenly disappear due to the unresolved issues of fearful people, and herd immunity is not a god-given right anyway.
By taking a position in the argument opposing me, you are supporting what I am attacking, like it or not. Perhaps that was not your intention? In any case, in the context of the subthread, you made a statement along the lines of "if anti-vaxxer stupidity continues to spread" the sky will fall and dogs and cats will be living together yada yadda yadda I'm not going to look it up. I have simply asked you to relate your statement to the subject of the argument - it's not a straw man, I'm asking you to prove your words were relevant to the issue in the context of the position I am defending against your attack.
If you are not supporting the withholding of medical care from anti-vaxxers, and you agree that herd immunity is not so fragile that non-conformists are going to cause a mass die-off of a significant portion of humanity, then we have no argument, you see?
I apologize if my poor writing skills have led to any misunderstandings, but my position has been that there's no good reason to combat anti-vaxxers with anything more than education. Herd immunity will not cease to function.
Grishnahk (in another branch) has argued persuasively that I'm at least partially wrong - he suggests more than just simple education would be optimal; that law and policy should be modified so that more effective vaccines will be created by the vaccine vendors instead of encouraging them to use the cheapest possible formulations like we do today. A large part of anti-vaxxer fear is based on their understanding of the motives and practices of the vaccine vendors, so he may well be right.
I see what you mean... good engineering practice would be to always use the most effective, least toxic vaccines (with the understanding that this would markedly decrease the profits of vaccine vendors in the short term, since they'd have to rebuild their processes). If taxpayer money has to be spent - which I doubt - spend it helping vaccine vendors modernize.
Just on a whim, where do you come down on the abortion debate?
That's a bit of a mess. On the one hand killing your kids because they're inconvenient is despicable. On the other hand we let people do far worse to them and then everybody else has to deal with the mess.
The affordable socialism solution to this is fairly straightforward - implanted contraception for everybody and it is only removed if you're issued a reproduction license. Social programs get generally funded out of license fees. So, anybody who doesn't want to have kids doesn't have to pay for running schools, and so on. If you want to have kids you get a share in the risk that they'll have problems, and you won't bear much more or less than that share no matter how it turns out (at least not financially). To encourage diversity beyond children of sociopaths who are good at accumulating money there could be "scholarships" based on any number of criteria, and perhaps even a lottery as well. Those who elect to just buy their way in end up paying a bit more so that their kids can live in a functional next generation.
We'll never see any of that happen, or a clean solution to the abortion problem. Most people would rather just deal with the unmanaged mess until society collapses under the weight of its entitlement programs than try to engineer a society that is sustainable.
We are certainly agreed it is a mess!
I was just thinking that if one believes that in some circumstances it is acceptable to infringe liberty to save lives, that this would be one case where a person might advocate doing so.
For what it's worth, I don't believe in socializing the prosecution of crimes and the administration of justice, so in my utopia that we'll never see, abortions (which I do believe to be the taking of a human being's life) could theoretically go unprosecuted unless some heir to the victim wanted to bear the expense of doing so. But for a variety of other reasons (including increased access to birth control) I think they would be much less frequent.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
I'm not convinced that it is always unethical to force somebody to do something not in their interest for the sole benefit of others.
In general I would agree with that statement. The key is what is the cost of doing X vs. the benefit derived to others. For example forcing people to pay taxes which are then used to provide medical treatment for everyone, regardless of income is good. The penalty is less money but the benefit derived is people getting to live.
However with forced vaccination the penalty is a very low, but non-zero risk of death or serious harm vs. a higher risk of dearth or risk of harm for someone who themselves refused the vaccination. If we accept this as ethical then the next question is how big a risk is it acceptable to force someone to take with their life? ! in a billion, 1 in a million, 1 in 10? Who gets to decide?
As such I would say that it is unethical to force anyone to undergo a procedure with any risk of serious harm or death because, if you are one of the unlucky ones, there is no benefit to anyone which can justify that death. In fact it is ethically similar to forced, live organ donation. You would never force someone to donate a kidney to save another - forcing vaccinations is exactly the same - the only real difference is that the risk of death is less to the person being forced.
As such I would say that it is unethical to force anyone to undergo a procedure with any risk of serious harm or death because, if you are one of the unlucky ones, there is no benefit to anyone which can justify that death.
Doing anything including getting out of bed or remaining in bed is associated with some risk of serious harm or death. So, clearly there has to be some give and take here.
If you force 1000 people to be vaccinated let's suppose that 2 people die and 10 people live who would have otherwise died. However, those 2 people die in a way that likely makes it easier to point to the vaccine as a cause (probably 2 others die also apparently from the vaccine but truly from some other cause). On the other hand, the 10 that benefit likely to do much later in life, and in ways that don't make the benefit so obvious.
So, you can't just look at the person who died and say "well, here are the 5 people who lived because of his sacrifice." The death was not pointless, and statistically it is completely justifiable. However, people aren't good with statistics, and they get very emotional about death.
I am still not convinced that forced medical procedures are therefore automatically unethical, even if they carry some risk of serious injury or death.
No, dumbass, see if you can understand this. /flame, so pay attention.
Vaccines are upward of 95% effective, meaning that if you vaccinate 100% of the population, some percent - say 4% - are still susceptible to the disease. The vaccine didn't work on them. Those 4% are safest when nobody around them has the disease. Are you tracking this? If nobody around them has the disease, the 4% who are still susceptible to the disease won't catch it.
So, suppose you got the vaccine and it didn't work on you - note that there's usually no way of knowing for sure, apart from getting sick.
So, unbeknownst to you, you can still catch this disease. Who can you catch it from?
(a) people who got vaccinated and it also didn't work... ~4%
(b) people who refused to get vaccinated... ~?%
So the combined risk for you is the sum of those percentages, and if any significant number of people refuse to get vaccinated, you're more likely to catch the disease from one of them than you are to catch it from someone else for whom the vaccine also failed to work.
Hence, people who don't get vaccinated are putting others - even a small percentage of those who were vaccinated - at risk.
You have "herd immunity" where the small percentage who couldn't be vaccinated (they were administered the vaccine, but it didn't work on them) are protected from the disease simply because the possibility of them being exposed to it is vanishingly small.
Do you talk to your mother with that mouth, coward?
Go live in a bubble, if you are so terrified of disease.
For instance, the trailing portion of Jn. 1:1
I agree that "and the Word was a god" in NWT might not have been the best way to word it. I even managed to convince a couple Witnesses that it might have been better rendered "and the Word was divine", as it was in An American Translation and The Authentic New Testament. Here are the three clauses of John 1:1, translated word-for-word from Greek:
Notice how few translations make any distinction between definite "the god" in the second clause and anarthrous (i.e. no article) "god" in the third. Thus it appears to refer to the Word's divine nature more than any sort of identity with God the Father.
Moreover, any translation must be consistent with the rest of the work. If the Word (i.e. Christ) "was God", then how can God be "the head of Christ", as Paul put it, in the same sense that "the head of the woman is the man" (1 Cor 11:3)?
Do you talk to your mother with that mouth, coward?
Yes, but she and intelligent people like her don't get the same treatment as you.