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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."
This actually makes perfect sense. Consider the following:
1. Most children -are- vaccinated.
2. Vaccinations do not really make you "immune" to catching a disease, they train your body to more efficiently fight it off.
So, what happens is that the small percentage on unvaccinated children are bringing Whooping Cough back into contact with the rest of us, and those vaccinated children who perhaps don't have their immune system running at full capacity (tired, stress, fighting other illnesses, etc) catch it. Since there are statistically so many more of the latter available, it makes perfect sense that there are more cases in vaccinated children than unvaccinated.
A more interesting statistic would be if every outbreak could be traced back to an unvaccinated "patient zero". I strongly suspect this is the case.
Right. Now let's work on improving the adjuvants used. For example during the swine flu scare a few years ago, Germany used a quality adjuvant that could not cause guillain-barre syndrome. In the US we used a worse adjuvant that caused various incidents of guillain-barre syndrome, narcolepsy, and death? Why? So the pharma companies could save a few cents per vaccine?