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In Calif. Study, Most Kids With Whooping Cough Were Fully Vaccinated
An anonymous reader writes with this extract from a Reuters article: "In early 2010, a spike in cases appeared at Kaiser Permanente in San Rafael, and it was soon determined to be an outbreak of whooping cough — the largest seen in California in more than 50 years. Witt had expected to see the illnesses center around unvaccinated kids, knowing they are more vulnerable to the disease. 'We started dissecting the data. What was very surprising was the majority of cases were in fully vaccinated children. That's what started catching our attention,' said Witt."
So... either their was something wrong with the vaccine, there was a mutation, or else this particular vaccine is less effective than most other vaccines. Unfortunately, most people will take this and generalize it to "vaccines don't work!!!"
Not so. If the anonymous reader had read the entire article from which he or she posted, s/he would have seen that what was found is that researchers had overestimated how long the whooping cough vaccine was effective. So if a kid had gotten the original shot or booster shot fairly recently (didn't say how many years out it was good for), that kid did not develop the disease.
Also, the article clearly points out that the vaccine works, just it's effect wanes over time. And it is recommended to get a booster. This extract grossly misquotes the intent of the article and undermines the work that the medical community does.
The story point to the vaccine schedule in California needs to be updated to the CDC recommendations. Nothing more.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Thimerosol hasn't been in childhood immunizations for over 10 years (except seasonal flu, and even there it's available thimerosol-free). No corresponding drop in autism rates.
There's another possibility. I did not RTFA, so I don't know if the absolute numbers were in there, but if the number of unvaccinated kids is small relative to the number of vaccinated kids, then it could just be an artifact of the small numbers. There is a theorem in probability about this IIRC, but I forget the name. It's often mentioned with respect to false positives in blood tests, for example.
If a blood test for a disease is 90% accurate for both positive and negative results (for simplicity we use the same value), but only 3% of the population truly has the disease, then the following can occur:
Of the 3% that have the disease, 10% (0.3% of the total population) will show negative
Of the 97% that don't have the disease, 10% will show positive - more than three times as many as the number who actually have the disease. This is the key fact - the results may be purely due to this kind of imbalance.
Only the 2.7% that have the disease will correctly show positive. In the total population about 12.7% will show positive, of which over 3/4 will be false.
Substitute vaccination for blood test - some small percentage of vaccinations will fail, but if the incidence of the disease is relatively quite small, that failure will show as a majority of those who have the disease.
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I used to expect a Slashdot poster to have either properly read or at least fairly summarize the article posted. This is the third time in a month period in which the title/summary has been misleading. It is this type of practice that assists the viral spread of the misleading headline/summary which eventually becomes the whole story for less discerning news sources. The Reuters headline itself is much more accurate "Whooping cough vaccine fades in pre-teens: study", based on the content of the article itself. The statistics seem to say (correctly) that an unvaccinated child is disproportionally more likely to be infected with whooping cough. The discovery was that the vaccine used on children did not appear to be as effective over time as the booster shot schedule expected. The length of time from the last booster shot is correlated to the an increased chance of infection, which was larger than expected in later years. The conclusion being this booster shot cycle should adjusted so booster shots occur more frequently. What would be more interesting is to discover whether it was the loss of herd immunity due to unvaccinated children which led to the outbreak. Vaccines are known to often be only effect 95-99% of the time and often fade over time requiring booster shots. As herd immunity levels decrease the chance of propagation throughout a population every time individuals are in contact increases. It possible and even likely that it was this loss of herd immunity that exposed the larger than expected "fading" in strength of the vaccine's effects, which otherwise would have remained relatively unrealized and unimportant.
> that could not cause guillain-barre syndrome ... n the US we used a worse adjuvant that caused
> various incidents of guillain-barre syndrome
Considering that no one knows exactly what causes GBS, I think what you meant was: "that caused less GBS than the adjuvant used in the US vaccine".
> Why?
Presumably because no one knew that there would be increased incidence of GBS?
> So the pharma companies could save a few cents per vaccine?
Sounds like you've been wearing that tin-foil hat for too long.
GBS is a very rare side effect of vaccination. AFAICS, you don't show me any evidence that it was the adjuvant rather than, for example, a mismatch between the adjuvant and the flu antigens.
Bingo!
Not only that: the non-immune kids, once you break past herd immunity numbers, become the incubators of the mutations that break out of the vaccination wall.
Of the 132 patients under age 18, 81 percent were up to date on recommended whooping cough shots and eight percent had never been vaccinated. The other 11 percent had received at least one shot, but not the complete series.
So:
81% fully vaccinated.
11% incomplete.
8% unvaccinated.
Threshold for herd immunity: generally considered to be at 92% minimum for pertussis.
In other words: the unvaccinated/incompletely-vaccinated 19% broke herd immunity. Once that happens, you have an incubation dish for mutations, you have transmission vectors to those for whom the vaccine is out of date or has not worked as well as hoped.
The rate of cases for each age, two through 18 years old, peaked among kids in their pre-teens. Among fully immunized kids, there were about 36 cases for every 10,000 children two to seven years old, compared to 245 out of every 10,000 kids aged eight to 12. "The longer you went from your last vaccine, the greater your risk of disease," Witt told Reuters Health. At age 13, the number of cases dropped, presumably because that's the age when children are eligible for their booster shot.
Aha! The REAL pattern begins to emerge:
Broken herd immunity lets the disease in: those with incomplete vaccinations begin to be affected at higher rates than those who have received the booster shot. In essence, age 12 - due to the pacing of the booster shots - is effectively a risk zone.
This is why "religious objections" for booster shots are such fucking bullshit: being unvaccinated DOES cause societal risk. We need 92% minimum coverage for herd immunity and we do not have it.