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Study Finds Unvaccinated Students Putting Other Students At Risk
New submitter haroldmandel writes in with a story about the increase of certain diseases in school-age children due to parents not having their kids vaccinated. "Parents nervous about the safety of vaccinations for their children may be causing a new problem: the comeback of their grandparents' childhood diseases, reports a new study from the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing. Despite the successes of childhood immunizations, wrote Penn Nursing researcher Alison M. Buttenheim, PhD, MBA, in the American Journal of Public Health, controversy over their safety has resulted in an increasing number of parents refusing to have their children vaccinated and obtaining legally binding personal belief exemptions against vaccinations for their children."
That is all i have say.
everyone's best friend should be Polio.
This is why vaccinations need to be mandatory. If you want to live in society, you have to follow society's rules and that includes rules that keep you from putting others at serious risk.
Vaccines are not that profitable. Please adjust your tinfoil hat.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Every reputable medical doctor, along with every pundit even slightly knowledgable about medicine or even basic biology has been warning of this issue ever since the antivaxxer morons got their idiotic campaign going.
kartune85 : Incapable of reason, observation or learning. A kind of dim, drab, flightless parrot.
I suspect that, rather than "Despite the successes of childhood immunizations", it would be because of those successes that the 'controversy' is presently raging...
Because of the effectiveness of widespread childhood vaccination, we've had at least a generation of people with minimal firsthand exposure to all the wacky pathogenic fun that used to be quite common. Plus, depending on the herd immunity requirements for a given pathogen and vaccine, being part of the first n% of opt-outs is basically cost-free. It isn't until you get closer to herd immunity breakdown that being unvaccinated starts to carry any serious additional risk of infection.
If you have a situation where people's knowledge of the risks is largely historical and the odds are pretty good that you can free-ride your way past them in any case, it (sadly) seems only to be expected that there would be room for assorted controversy to flourish.
This is why vaccinations need to be mandatory. If you want to live in society, you have to follow society's rules and that includes rules that keep you from putting others at serious risk.
And for those that refuse or still get sick, as a final solution they should be placed in camps where they can be concentrated for the health of the society. We should also place addicts too - they are a harm to society with the DUIs and whatnot.
There are some others with deviant behavior that places others, especially children, at risk - like kiddie porn consumers - and they should be put into those camps. Muslims too - they are a threat to our society.
We could put the Secret Service in charge - give them new snappy uniforms to make it look official.
We can make a better society! For America!
He didn't need to be paid, the mind control nanobots they put in the vaccines made him do it.
Alternate hypothesis ; anti-vaxxers are actually a shadowy conspiracy of the radical Green movement who want the human race thinning out a bit to lower our impact on Mother Earth.
These diseases cause not just death, but maiming and suffering on a grand scale when allowed to spread unchecked. Not being vaccinated is on a par with smoking - it's a stupid and bad for not just your health but for the health of those around you.
Vaccination must have been very successful for us to even HAVE an anti vaccination movement, because the memory of the horrors of childhood diseases makes anyone bearing it a lifeline proponent of getting your shots...
Its really sad, because those who suffer will be the children who don't get vaccinated, the elderly who will be exposed to those children who get the disease, and the babies who are too young to get vaccinated yet. Those who should suffer have already HAD their vaccinations when THEY were children!
When you live in a society, you DO have certain responsibilities to the society!
At its core, the anti-vax movement is bad risk assessment for a few reasons. First of all, the horrors of the diseases that most vaccinations prevent against haven't been seen in a few generations. People my age (30's) with kids have never lived in a world where you could get polio or mumps at any moment and wind up dead, on an iron lung, deaf, scarred for life, etc. They score the risk of these infections as low because they don't see them. (The fallacy here being that the *reason* they don't see them is because of vaccines.)
Then, they hear scare tactics from certain people (Wakefield, McCarthy, etc) who claim that vaccines contain mercury/fetal tissue/generic toxins/etc that will harm their child. One shot and suddenly your child will catch The Autism. (Picture that in a much scarier font and cue a woman screaming off camera.) This would be so horrible and so, they conclude, we must stop all vaccinations until they are proven 100% safe.
The fallacy with this last one is that 1) there has never been a proven link between vaccines and autism, 2) even if there was, the diseases vaccines prevent are far worse than autism, and 3) no medical procedure is 100% safe. In fact, nothing anyone does is 100% safe. Driving in to work? You could get in a car crash and die. Better not commute to work until they can design cars that are 100% safe. Walking down the street? You could trip, hit your head, and die. Better not walk until they design 100% safe sidewalks.
The fact is that risk that vaccines pose is minuscule (and mainly limited to allergic reactions or slight fevers) and the threat these diseases pose is huge should they make a comeback. It is only bad risk assessment that makes vaccines look like a bigger threat than the diseases.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Jenny McCarthy body count
“I do believe sadly it's going to take some diseases coming back to realize that we need to change and develop vaccines that are safe. If the vaccine companies are not listening to us, it's their f___ing fault that the diseases are coming back. They're making a product that's s___. If you give us a safe vaccine, we'll use it. It shouldn't be polio versus autism.”
Jenny McCarthy in Time Magazine, April 2009
And I always thought society would get smarter and smarter.
This really is a question of rights. Personally I think the promotion of rights has gotten out of hand, and I think most should get vaccinated.
However, lets consider the pros and cons of vaccines.
pro
health benefits from negligible to lifesaving,
herd immunity
con
side effects from minor discomfort to lifelong illness or death.
Yes the chances of being sensitive and dying from a vaccine are too small, but shouldn't our own bodies be inviolable in all but the most extreme cases?
Isn't part of living in a "free society" the right to make choices, even the wrong ones?
The data suggests that in most cases the benefits are clearly in favour of getting vaccinated, and we should, but I think we should have the right to choose.
Tough on the kids, but if the flat earthers want to devolve back to their Garden of Eden fantasy, let's get the party started.
The only real question is which group is going to end up as the Eloi and which the Morlocks. Me, I'm not that keen on the sun.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
How can the vaccinated students be at risk? They're supposed to be immune.
I find that you deserve death by torture.
My logic is just as unassailable as yours.
revenue not profits
you have to spend money on R&D, FDA approval, complying with all kinds of regulations selling to the government, bulk discounts. very little profit on vaccines
No. Vaccines are not 100% effective. If you are vaccinated, but no one else is, your chances for infection are much greater than they would be if otherwise because each one of those people has greater chance of catching and spreading the disease to you. The more people are vaccinated, the less chance each person has of contracting and spreading the disease.
The concern isn't for the children whose parents didn't get them immunized. The concern is for another group of children who can not be immunized due to allergies to ingredients in the vaccines. Basically the population refusing to be vaccinated is a vector to infect those who can't be vaccinated.
Maybe some schools should have it as a matter of safety. If your child is not immunized, you cannot come to this school because you put other children at risk. That way they will end up taking their kids to "open minded" schools. At these schools you will very soon discover some pretty grim statistics. Within a few years all these alternative schools will cease to exist. It is terrible that we treat kids as ginneapigs.
So how does rapine of corporations change medical fact?
Vaccines work and not vaccinating your children cause infections in others.
GSK empploy people. Does that prove employing people is SCAREMONGERING???
Like Mercury...I don't know about you guys but the thought of injecting mercury into my bloodstream..not something I'm fond of..can't we make vaccine's without that..
The only students at risk are those who do not get vaccinated
False. Some number of children can't be vaccinated for legitimate medical reasons, usually allergic reaction to the vaccine ingredients. Then there's a certain number, ranging from 1-5+% that the vaccine simply doesn't take, they are not 100% effective. These two classes of people rely on the fact that the diseases they are vulnerable to aren't present in the general population, if there is an outbreak, the sick people don't come into contact with enough vulnerable people for the disease to spread at a rate that can sustain itself. The numbers necessary are different for each disease, but generally range from 90-99% need to be immune to prevent a wide scale outbreak. These people are harming more than their own children (which would be bad enough), they put everyone else at risk too.
These people drive me crazy. I've talked to some of them. They don't believe in risking their child with a vaccination. But when I ask about vaccinations as a whole, they also don't want an end to them. Basically what they want is everyone else to vaccinate and risk their children; so they don't have to vaccinate their own.
Having worked in the medical research field, I can tell you with certainty that vaccines are that profitable...
Finally when it's all said and done, the actual pharmaceutical company can bring in billions of dollars in revenue selling the vaccine, which is just about enough to fund the next few projects.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
+1 "I'm right, you're wrong because I say so"
How about letting choice run both ways? If you choose to refuse vaccination for your child, the school can choose to refuse to allow them in? Exemptions only allowed in the case of provable medical conditions such as allergies.
That way, if your community decides that it wants vaccinations, you can either go along with it, find an alternative school somewhere else or choose to home school.
Sigs are so 1990s. No way would I be seen dead with one.
Effective does not equal one hundred percent efficacy. There is a direct correlation between being vaccinated and not catching those specific diseases - it's not a high correlation between being immunised for measles and catching something else, and this is still being tested in those parts of the world that don't have vaccinations. The risk of autism is small to non existent (there is no correlation). Would you rather your kid have autism or catching tetanus and dying? Parents tell all sorts of anecdotes that turn out to be true, the most prominent of which is sugar rushes. The singular of data is not anecdote. -just because big pharmaceutical companies benefit doesn't mean children who get vaccinated don't either. It's like not eating food because 'Big Agro' is profiting.
These all seem like wonderful things to be profitable for.
Study Finds Unvaccinated Students Putting Other Students At Risk
Uh, yeah, that's because that is exactly what vaccines are meant to avert. Did we need a study for that?
(no, I didn't read TFA; yes, I am being a bit facetious)
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
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Vaccines are not like other drugs. They expire... rather quickly. A large percentage of them are thrown out at the end of the year. Then the research for next years vaccine starts again. It's a never ending cycle and it costs them a fortune. Unlike a drug like Viagra where then can spent a bunch of money researching it, then make pills that have a nearly indefinite shelf life and they do not have to start over every year unless some terrible side effect is found.
Because vaccines are not 100% effective. You have 4 groups of people:
1) Immune (because of vaccine or natural)
2) Not immune, but no disease found
3) Not immune, disease carrier, but not sick
4) Not immune, disease carrier, sick
Group 1, Immune people are good, always. However, some people that do get the vaccine will not end up with immunity and thus end up in group 2. However, if these group 2 people come in contact with group 3 or group 4 then they become group 3 or group 4 people. The larger the pool of group 2/3/4 people, the larger the chance a group 2 comes in contact with a group 3 or 4.
(Depending on the disease people can stay in group 3 forever, or for a limited amount of time before moving to group 4)
So, by not begin vaccinated, you increase the chance of getting the disease, and also increase the chance of transmitting that disease to other people.
... from his buddy Donald Trump who recently claimed:
“Massive combined inoculations to small children is the cause for big increase in autism spread shots over long period and watch positive result.”
That's almost as bad as Akins "legitimate rape" comment (note: Romney's running mate co-authored the anti-abortion bill by the Republicans.). If you think this thinking is restricted to "just" a potential senator and vice-president please note the Republican platform REMOVED the clause allowing for abortions in case of Rape or Incest.
Judge them not (just) by what they say but what they do.
And that all goes into the drug company's pocket, because, of course, vaccines cost nothing to make.
Vaccines make so little profit that there's difficulties in keeping the manufacturing of them going--and research into new ones has almost stopped.
Everyone who's not a paid shill for the government or the pharmaceutical industry, raise your hand! :p
You mean people who think they are special when they are not?
You will grow up, your ideas will change and you may even come to realize that having a functioning society is good for even you.
Being a human means being part of society, and to do that you have to expect some give and take. Vaccines or quarantine are one of those.
Interesting how "my body, my choice" has such limited applicability.
"And for those that refuse or still get sick, as a final solution they should be placed in camps"
Well, yes.
We currently call them hospitals and quarantines.
We have a similar thing for people who are a danger to those around them from physical violence: Prison and Psychiatric Hospitals. Or are you saying that it's really bad if people who have murdered (or think that a little green man is living inside every other human and must be brought into the light) or raped or cannot help but rape someone should be locked away for the safety of others?
Oh noes, the chemicals!
First, most vaccines don't contain mercury anymore. Second, vaccines only ever contained very small amounts, as a preservative. If you eat fish even a few times per year, that plus your exposure through drinking water probably adds up to more mercury than you'd get from a vaccine, even if you did get one of the vaccines that still has mercury in it.
The preservative is necessary to keep the vaccine from going bad long enough that it can be reasonably distributed.
I haven't decided if I think all of this stuff is sensationalism or not, but it doesn't really matter. If I ask my school for a count of the number of kids in the school that are unvaccinated, and a count for the number of kids in my kids actual classroom that are unvaccinated, first are they legally allowed to share that (anonymous) data with me, and second are they legally required to share that data with me? It seems that if there is a possibility that some moron is risking my own kids health, I should be able to find out about it.
In other words, stupid idiots are putting other people at risk because "that's how they control us" or "That's how you become autistic!"
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Simple solution. If you don't want to vaccinate your kid, they don't get to mingle with healthy ones. Added bonus: the healthy ones probably believe in evolution and other ungodly things.
Why must humanity be so derpy-derp?
"Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
you really think a nation-wide health program would pay retail price for vaccines?
travel shots are one thing, herd immunity is another.
i know it sounds alien to say such a thing, but just because they're a pharmaceutical company, it doesn't mean that EVERY action of theirs is evil.
now, i personally question the ethics of manufacturers of homoeopathic remedies - selling bottles of water (AUD$ 0.4 per bottle btw) for upward of 20 bucks and it does nothing whatsoever.
just because homoeopathic companies aren't necessarily multinationals, doesn't mean they can't be callous and potentially evil as well.
this world is made up of shades of grey. but there's also colours if you look closely enough.
So it's your contention that vaccines are a conspiracy among the data centers, insurers, utility companies, data analysts, and researchers?
I'll grant you that the global market has made newer vaccines more profitable than they were in the past, but vaccines still have very low profit margins. In fact, I doubt there is any profit at all on the older vaccines that we are arguing over here.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
In order to drive a car, you need a government-mandated license indicating a minimum competency level so you aren't a danger to others.
In order to fly a plane, you need a government-mandated license indicating a minimum competency level so you aren't a danger to others.
The right to practice law, become a doctor, and even have a job (by requiring social security number) is mandated by law.
Why are people allowed to create a public safety problem by opting out of "required" vaccines?
Read previous comments like yours and their informative replies. You are a fucking idiot. Babies are not born vaccinated, not all people can get vaccinated, not all people acquire immunity from vaccination, and some vaccines are not permanent (tetanus and smallpox are both said to lose effectiveness over time, apparently also whooping cough).
Whooping cough kills. Diphtheria kills. Polio paralyzes and kills. Mumps causes sterility in men and older boys. Smallpox kills (and the smallpox vaccine has/had more side effects than most). Tetanus kills. German measles causes birth defects. Measles damages and kills.
The only vaccine that I know of where there was much debate at all about its necessity was the chickenpox vaccine -- but even that causes shingles if it recurs, and I have seen a case of shingles in my own child (one of the last kids to not get vaccinated because he got chickenpox from his brother as an infant -- a few more months, and he'd have had the vaccine), and it hurt like hell.
First of all, do you know how much it cost to make that vaccine and how much total revenue it brings in compared to other medication. Here's why pharmaceuticals don't like vaccines: Some vaccines are only needed once. Sometimes you need boosters but at most it is a few shots over the lifetime of a person. A pharmaceutical is far more interested in selling something you need on a regular basis. For example generic Lipitor may cost $80 per month after insurance. I would bet you a year supply of Lipitor costs more than all the vaccines a person needs over their lifetime.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
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Well, then you want to catch every single child you can, to maximize the profit, right? After all, you invested in R&D, FDA approval & compliance with regulations. But once you have it on the assembly line, each vial of vaccine can't really cost much on top of those up-front costs.... so we'd better start immunizing all those stragglers too!
Lawsuits, education (ie. defending against boneheaded accusations), distribution, storage... We're struggling in this country to keep vaccine makers interested in continuing to make a flu vaccine, and that's probably one of the best health-for-the-dollar investments one can possibly make. Death from flu is similar to death from drunk driving (~11K drunk driving deaths; 3K-40K flu deaths a year depending on the severity of the season), and yet not getting a flu vaccine is not ostracized like driving drunk is. And yes, getting more children decreases the risk you'll lose money, but it's also the best way for vaccines to work. An individual getting a vaccine is only 80-95% effective, but a community getting a vaccine breaks the entire disease cycle and the effect is multiplied dramatically.
E pluribus unum
"They're stupid"
"And that's why they need educated."
Oh, the irony.
I've worked at the CDC in Atlanta and spoken to some of the people in charge of vaccinations. On guy who was near the top (in my interview) asked very pointed questions about what I thought of vaccinating and made it very clear that he thought people who disapproved of vaccinations and their safety to be "crazy people". At the time, I was surprised there were such people who would disapprove. He said that, "They write letters to congress, they call us up, they even stage protests!."
It was around this time that 9/11 happened. The CDC was very concerned that terrorists might get hold of some smallpox virus from some hidden Russian stores or something. A first run of smallpox vaccine was put together to give to people who would be working in the field. It was quit, however, as some people had very strong reactions to it. I think one person even died of a heart problem.
I'm not really for or against vaccines. The human body is designed to take notice and react to what is put in them. The principle is good. Why not use that to our advantage. And in the above case, one can say that the company was in a rush and didn't get the mix right. But does that always excuse them? What about when they have a lot of time and money to get it right? Why do they always ask for (and get) a guarantee that there can be no litigation? If the vaccine is so safe and works so well and is so inexpensive (with our tax support), why should we have to force people to take them?
With what I have seen, I do have questions. And personally, the only time I have ever had the flu bad, was the ONE TIME in the last ten years I had a flu vaccination. And from a civil rights and property rights perspective, the person who had the final authority and responsibility to determine what goes into a body is not the government but the individual (or parent). Forcing people to have vaccinations is NAZI logic. The logic seems to be to tell parents who don't agree, "Your child can't go into the school system then." But since they pay taxes into it, that is a double edged sword. All you need is one vaccine to go really bad and word to get out on the internet. In Sum, I am not against vaccines, if they are good vaccines. I am against the Lord/Serf attitude that is taken by government officials in control of the vaccination programs. Like it or not, voluntary is the way to go in a country like ours. It keeps the government from breaking rights of the people it does NOT have. I also think there needs to be transparency regarding the results of vaccinations. And if a vaccine causes a problem, there is a right to redress of grievances and peaceful protest.
Because every Rep or Dem thinks exactly the same thing.
This kind of stupidity is exactly why I refuse to associate myself with either label.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Even if we put aside the knowledge that homeopathy doesn't do anything, there's no chance of quality control. They themselves admit that the "water memory" is not measurable by any scientific instrument. So if I gave you one vial of homeopathic solution and one vial of distilled water that I bought in the grocery store, how would you tell the difference? How can you tell that the "homeopathic cure" you bought isn't really just tap water (or plain sugar pills in the case of the tablet variety)? How can you be sure that it was prepared as the homeopathy company claims it has been?
The answer is that you can't. By claiming that their "cure" can't be measured by any instrumentation, they've admitted that they could be selling anything to the gullible folks who are buying it up. Unlike traditional medicine manufacturers where pretty much any lab can measure what's in a given drug sample. (No chance to swap aspirin with sugar pills without being found out.)
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Umm... you definitely are confused. Other children at risk are ones that can't be vaccinated due to genuine medical reasons. Vaccines do not stop you from being infected. They will reduce the severity and length you are infected but will not stop it.
I agree that they shouldn't be mandatory but educating people is extremely difficult, especially when it is education in moderately difficult to understand science. We have people that believe the earth is less than 10,000 years old and evolution by natural selection is equivalent to a chimpanzee giving birth to a Homo sapien.
Funny thing... Just saw an ad in the local news paper (an ad for wegmans grocery stores) that generic Lipitor will now be free (90 pill prescriptions or something along those lines)
In fact, that's the main reason behind the special "vaccine court" that handles claims of problems with vaccines. Vaccines make so little profit that any legal risk they pose to the company could tip the scales into them being not worth the effort. The vaccine court is a way to weed out the frivolous claims (i.e. "this vaccine turned my son autistic and my evidence is Jenny McCarthy") and take action on the valid cases. If vaccines were dumped into the main court system, lawsuits would spread like wildfire over every imagined complaint. The companies would have to defend themselves against them and vaccines just not be worth the effort, money-wise. They would be losing money (via frivolous lawsuits) and their production would be stopped. Then we'd all suffer through those diseases again.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
On the plus side, technological advancement had replaced the iron lung with much smaller, sexier CPAP machines.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
So it's your contention that vaccines are a conspiracy among the data centers, insurers, utility companies, data analysts, and researchers?
And the food producers who profit from the researchers buying food for their families, and the machinist who made the data center's racks, and the veterinarian who neutered the data analyst's dog, and even you! Yes, you! You're a part of it in some roundabout way that really makes sense only to economists and conspiracy theorists!
I'll grant you that the global market has made newer vaccines more profitable than they were in the past, but vaccines still have very low profit margins. In fact, I doubt there is any profit at all on the older vaccines that we are arguing over here.
A lot of the older vaccines' R&D is paid off now, so the only costs are production and distribution like any other product. Since the retail price for the vaccines has also dropped, my rough estimate pegs them at about the same profit margin as new vaccines: really really low.
Plainly and without sarcasm (for once), vaccines are a very large market, with very slim profits. The millions of dollars drug companies spend on the catered dinners, advertisements, and private-island vacations for executives is pocket change compared to the billions spent in R&D costs.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
I have to politely disagree with your conclusion. If I may, I would like to expound upon my opinion.
Based on the information available and at least on an individual scale, the average human is roughly as smart or smarter than our ancient ancestors were. Of course, no reliable testing data exists further back than a generation or two, so any commentary on human intelligence positive or negative is somewhat subjective.
However, I think it is fair to say that the issues we are having today with the seeming increase in the number of "stupid" people is not so much an indicator of declining human intelligence, but an artifact of our modern society.
Simply put, the pace of technological and social changes in society is occurring at a faster rate than the average human can keep up with. While we can keep up with the changes in a specific discipline, (say, automobile tech or computers or the like) it is nearly impossible for our brains to process all the changes that are happening at once. We simply can't keep up.
Combine that with a massive increase in the available information (thanks to the Internet) and our ability to make rational risk-assessments becomes more and more compromised.
Now compound that with the fact that western culture, capitalism and medicine have greatly reduced the average western mortality rates, thus allowing our population to increase and the average number of less intelligent and otherwise mentally challenged people to survive and you will have a spike in "stupid behavior".
Really, there are only two ways to deal with this:
1. Government regulated breeding. Only works as well as the regulators running it, and based on the current crop of regulators, I'd not want to bet my society (or my kids) on it. Not to mention the hideous tragedies such tyrannical policies would create.
2. Increased educational focus on logic and reasoning and a "classical" education approach. IE: Logic & Reasoning, Math, Science, History and Arts & Technology as focuses in primary and secondary education.
I personally think that option 2 would be far more effective in the long run than option 1. Far better to equip all of our children of all intelligence levels to be able to handle modern society via clear reasoning and improved risk assessment skills than to attempt the impossible task of breeding perfect people.
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
Your first link has some odd statements. It's well known that the whooping cough vaccine wears off. That's why you get boosters. Second, the seasonal flu vaccine DID seem to increase contraction of H1N1 by a bit, but the number cited by the article seems to be the raw number. A lot of people who get the seasonal flu vaccine do so because they work or live in conditions that are high risk for contracting the flu, H1N1 included.
So, if people sort themselves into two groups say one called "Republicans" and the other say "Democrats" and would identify themselves as such, we could save everyone a lot of grief.
That's not really accurate though. The people who agree with those statements are properly termed "morons" or "idiots" regardless of party affiliation.
You're right there's a correlation with voting Republican at the moment, but I'd attribute that to a related-but-not-identical third factor, namely getting all ones news and information from right-wing propaganda outlets like Fox News. But at the same time, how many people think that:
- George W Bush ordered the 9/11 attacks
- Obama has never ordered the summary execution of a US citizen
- the reason we don't have a public healthcare option was that the Republicans demanded it in negotiations
- Obama has never locked up a US citizen for over a year in solitary confinement without putting him on trial
- If you taxed the richest 1% of Americans 90% for a year, you'd be able to eliminate the federal debt
I'm sure that list could be made longer easily enough.
I am officially gone from
You could have just said "woosh"... :)
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
You say "on par", but the reality is that until vaccines were discovered, smoking wasn't that big a deal due to the probability that one of the diseases we now vaccinate against would kill you. Smoking is among leading causes of death because we managed to clear out a whole host of really nasty bugs.
I personally believe in this day and age, anyone actively preventing vaccination of a child should be brought up on charges of crimes against humanity. Not even slightly hyperbolic.
Actually, the profits are close to zero even after the up front costs are taken care of. Vaccine production is not a very profitable business, with many producers taking losses some years. They mostly continue to exist because large institutional buyers promise to grab certain amounts in order to keep them in production. Most of the companies that make vaccines would be happy if the entire division got shut down so they could focus on more profitable things. Often governments have to pressure drug companies to keep the divisions open with threats (or promises) around other things.
Briefly considered, but I kinda wanted to make the point about old vaccines having about the same profit (which is why the pharma companies try so hard to keep control of their old patents), and the note about the millons vs. billions was something I wanted to put in the first comment, but it didn't fit the tone.
"Whoosh" responses also irritate me, but that's just a pet peeve.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Not to mention that mercury was blamed for "vaccines cause autism." They removed the mercury. Autism rates still rose. So they changed their claim of why "vaccines cause autism" to something else. Every time the link they claim is proven false, they move the goal posts somewhere else so they can claim that "vaccines cause autism" hasn't *really* been disproven and that the burden is on everyone else to disprove claim #1,263.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
My understanding is an estimated 2 percent to 3 percent of U.S. children are allergic to eggs, causing issues with vaccines. Also children with known allergies can be given anti-allergy medications, such as antihistamines and corticosteroids, before vaccination to help ward off or lessen an allergic reaction. [plagiarism]
Vaccines for non-flu illnesses are 99% effective.
Thanks for the insult. I know children aren't born vaccinated. Duh. Children are vaccinated the DAY they are born in the hospitals. Within hours of being born. For a disease they're not likely to get until at least teen years.
I'm not saying there are no valid diseases to vaccinate against -- and people can do whatever they want. I'm saying that buying the government's line [on herd immunity/the safety &/or necessity of vaccinations...] without questioning it is for fucking idiots.
Have you given birth? I have, twice. When you have a child, the assumption is you will vaccinate. If you don't stop them, they vaccinate your child within moments of birth. It starts with eye drops to prevent blindness from gonorrhea. If you know you don't have a VD, why are they putting drops in your kids' eyes? This is later followed up with Hep B vaccine -- same day as birth, before you're summarily dismissed from the hospital. Some of the diseases they're vaccinating your kids from are not the types that are spread by air or contact or drinking water... but they'll vaccinate your kid without full consent or full information.
Legally, vaccination is an invasive procedure (akin to surgery), requiring full disclosure by the doctor of potential side effects, the information packet included with the vaccine serum, etc. What happens IN the doctor's office? They reach in the cabinet "It's time for your vaccinations..." and they pull out a bottle & a syringe & get to work...
It's become so habitual that they're not even following their own industry regulations.
You probably don't have kids -- like most of the "fucking idiots" posting on this topic. If you do, you almost definitely didn't go through the labor to have them, didn't see what they did to the babies when they whisked them out of the delivery room, and probably didn't go with them to the doctor's office when they got their vaccines.... And you're probably ignorant of what the vaccine schedule actually is, and how many vaccines they routinely give to children nowadays...usually in violation of law. It's an assembly-line procedure now. But it's not supposed to be. But that doesn't worry anyone here. :)
---- I'm out of your mind!
Right now I get my kids vaccinated. If it became mandatory I would immediately stop and reconsider.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
It may be the anti-vaccine crowd, or it may be you. There is evidence that catching things is good for you long term and that vaccines may not be as effective at building the immune system as natural disease. Notice that I'm sidestepping the issue of vaccine safety and still making an argument. Now I'm a fan of eradication programs - I've got a small-pox vaccination scar and think it's great that the disease has been eliminated. I think it's great that we may soon see an end to polio. I'm up for eradicating the really bad stuff. Chicken Pox vaccine? Fuck that, it used to be a right of passage. Sure, if you don't get it as a child you should be vaccinated because getting it as an adult can be terrible. Or perhaps it should be a choice, but to make people get vaccinated? And flu? God no, not for healthy people at low risk (my grandmother died of it at 92, she probably should have gotten the vaccine). Hey, if they really are stupid then not getting it will be evolution in action and humans will become smarter - you should be happy. And lastly, if you get your kid vaccinated and they catch the shit anyway please don't run around blaming those who didn't vaccinate. We have to many people blaming thier problems on others and trying to tell other people what to do.
Again, I'm all for eradication programs for the really bad stuff, but for the rest I think calling people who don't want vaccines "stupid" is just plain ignorant.
The fact is, there's profit being made here. The next question is what lobbying & what pressure is being put on legislators to insure these profits.
If that is your sole argument, that someone is lobbying the government to force people to get vaccinated so these companies can make money, you've lost any semblance of logical argument.
The fact that you consider homeopathic to be medicine, which it isn't, and choose to focus on the money aspect, which is completely irrelevant to the medically sound reason to be vaccinated, shows your lack of common sense.
I can assure you when people were being vaccinated for smallpox or polio, no one gave a rats ass about who was making a profit, or if a profit was even being made. All they cared about was that the yearly sweeps of infections that plagued the country came to a stop.
Are you now going to complain about all the money those big bad corporations made eradicating smallpox and polio? How about rinderpest, an equally devastating disease which has afflicted animals since before the time of Greeks? Are you going to complain about the money corporations made selling this vaccine to the animal industry to innoculate animals to prevent them from getting infected and making it the second time in human history that a disease has been wiped from the face of the Earth?
It seems counter-intuitive to complain these companies are making money to produce a product which will, eventually, make the use of that product unnecessary (in the case of smallpox and rinderpest). After all, wouldn't it be easier to make something which only treats the symptoms rather than cures it? That way they could have a perpetual source of income.
You and Jenny McCarthy would make a great pair. You should go on tour.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Slashdot. This is science. Pro-vaccine is science by definition. Abandon all hope, mate.
If the program was not profitable, the drug companies wouldn't produce the vaccines
I wouldn't say that vaccines aren't profitable. What I will say is that they're closer to computer equipment profit margins(1%), not jewelry store ones(50+%) like designer drugs have.
My grandfather had polio. I'm all for vaccination. While we're at it, I support putting unvaccinated kids together in special schools. That way when a MMR type outbreak happens they all get it and the parents get to experience the consequences of their failure. Oh, and it makes the news in a splashy public way so more parents get their kids their shots.
I don't read AC A human right
Um, medicine is not sure what causes autism but signs point to genetic abnormalities. And the one study that linked autism to vaccines has been revoked due to 1) flawed or faked data and 2) conflict of interest.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
They removed the mercury. Autism rates still rose.
This needs repeating, in a post all by itself. And in boldface.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Makers of vaccines are legally protected from lawsuits.
See [new news]: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/22/AR2011022206008.html
or [established decades ago]: http://www.hrsa.gov/vaccinecompensation/index.html
Drunk driving vs. flu deaths? Wow....
I wish people would stop comparing vaccines with things wildly unrelated.
---- I'm out of your mind!
How's evolution working out for you? As an individual, living here today, for let's say 80 years? Or maybe you really think on a thousand-year or 10 thousand-year timescale?
As a family person, do you play the lottery game with your children? Or as someone with friends, are you prepared to play that game with other people? When they've chosen not to play, but rather do the best they can for themselves and their families?
The polite description for you would be "eugenicist". Selfish, misguided, conspiracy theorist, anti-science would also fit.
I'm not sure where you think the government can simply make research come out of it's ass just because it feels like it. Just about everything we've done in this country that has a public component has also had a private one. Getting to the moon? Private companies probably profited handsomely. Developing public transportation? Defense contracts? Definitely private. The Internet? Public-private cooperation. Private entities were involved at the outset of many systems. Most science in every country has private grants or interest in it. Indeed, science itself was developed with a healthy dose of private interest and profit motive. After all, profits are one measure of how useful applied science can be.
Sure, profits are made, but are we really using aversion to "profit" to override scientifically proven benefits of vaccination? And trundling out the fact that some sinister lobbyists may be involved? Like, the American Medical Association or Save the Children? Nothing like throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Vaccination programs are hardly breaking the bank and bankrupting people. This is something that *should* be making profits because it is a worthwhile program that deserves economic support.
I get that the homeopathy example might have been a bit of an unnecessary pile-on, but the people who are anti-vaccination do tend to spout off ridiculous notions that sound like the homeopathy crowd, so I personally find the faux-pas to be forgivable.
Nice try!
I am curious about what the real correlation would be, there are a lot of factors that make it seem like democrats prefer Apple, but I suspect they don't.
For example, the states employing the most IT employees are also states that are more strongly democratic. A lot of companies will subsidize cell phones for their IT employees to use instead of pagers. If the top choices are Apple and Blackberry, then they end up with those and the results are skewed.
If a study is done that looks at what choice is made when "they have a choice of any phone", then that might be a better indication. I suspect independents prefer android, because they don't like restrictions of choice.
The rest of the choices are obviously Republican! ;)
The infection vector for polio isn't all that hard to control.
it isn't like it is airborn. it spreads via fecal material.
so primarily you just need to wash your hands regularily.
To the innumerate, perhaps. Let's do some simple arithmetic:
Autism is typically diagnosed around the same time that children receive their childhood vaccinations, even in children who do not get vaccinated. Let's ignore the likely possibility that due to media reports, parents are more likely to be alert to symptoms of autism right after vaccination, and assume that children are vaccinated on a random date, and first exhibit clear symptoms of autism on a random date. If autism is unrelated to vaccination, what is the probability that a child in the US will first exhibit autistic symptoms within 72 hours (3 days) after vaccination?
3 days is 3/365 = 0.0082 year
About 4 million children are born in the US per year. Let's assume that they are all vaccinated in a single year (yes, I know children get multiple vaccinations throughout childhood but I'm being conservative)
Incidence of autism is hard to estimate as diagnostic criteria have changed and doctors are more likely today to consider a diagnosis of autism as opposed to simple mental retardation. Current estimates of incidence are around 1%, and a survey of incidence of autism in adults in Great Britain indicates this has been fairly stable for the past 70 years. But this is still somewhat controversial, so let's be very conservative and assume that only 1 child in 1000 will first exhibit clear symptoms of autism in a the same year as he or she gets a vaccination. How many children per year will, purely by chance, first exhibit clear symptoms of autism within 72 h of their vaccination?
4 million * 0.001 * 0.0082 = 33 per year
So over 10 years about 330 children would have first exhibited autistic symptoms within 72 hours after vaccination. Expand the period after vaccination to 2 weeks (I've heard people blame vaccination when their child was diagnosed a month or two after a vaccination), and that number rises to 1,524.
So even if autism has nothing to do with vaccination, plenty of parents would have children who developed autistic symptoms with 72 h of vaccination.
Which helps to explain the scientific adage: "The plural of anecdote is not data."
When was the last time that they required smallpox vaccination in order to attend school? Heck, when was the last time they even recommended it outside of special circumstances?
Of course, the smallpox vaccine is one of the nastier ones, but even as nasty as it is, it's still incredibly safe compared to the disease - which would kill something like 30% of the infected last time it ran wild. Variolation, an 'early' form of vaccination* which killed 1% of those treated, was considerably better. Then they developed the cowpox technique, which was more like .1% dead, on up to the bifurcated tine poke vaccine, which is more like .00001%.
The medical community is constantly doing risk analysis studies. They've dropped vaccines before, when they're sufficiently eradicated.
I don't read AC A human right
Actually, I don't believe that is the case. Smoking kills people who have survived to adulthood to start smoking, and then kills them later in life. Most diseases you vaccinate against kill children, and children are not going to be smokers and usually have not lived enough to contract most forms of lung cancer.
Vaccines saved more children who can then go on to smoke, which may have increased the absolute number of people dying from lung cancer, but the relative percentage was not affected by vaccinations. In other words, 100 people may now be dying of lung cancer instead of ten, but that's because the adult population is ten times higher (and now 900 people do *not* get lung cancer, as opposed to only 90 before).
But I do agree that we need to take action against non-vaccinated children. We rely on herd immunity to keep us safe. I would prefer that the method of doing so be one that is humane, but it may be difficult to manage that outside of something that would resemble an internment camp or penal colony. Personally, I believe purposely unvaccinated children should be removed from their parents, vaccinated, returned, and that should be the end of it. Parents would be detained or lose custody as required only to ensure that the vaccinations were completed. And mind you, I despise big government, but there are definitely things government is meant to do which does not count as overreaching.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
You confusing a couple of things. Vaccines do outdate quickly, but except for influenza, the formulation is pretty stable.
The big problem with vaccine production is that bulk production is a cast iron bitch. It's difficult and expensive. And because most of the buyers are large, bulk purchasers, few pay 'retail'. Then there are the lawsuits....
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
It wasn't an insult, it was an accurate description. If you paid attention to the vaccine schedules, you would know that kids are NOT vaccinated against whooping cough from the get-go. A couple of weeks ago I filled out the medical forms for our second-oldest going to college, and whooping cough is not the only one like that -- AND I know roughly what the vaccine schedules are. Only Hep B (then) is given at birth. Everything else is later, at two months, or afterwards. And yeah, that first DTAP is nasty; your kid gets a fever and turns into a limp rag for a little while.
In addition, if you were capable of reading for comprehension, you would have noticed that I do in fact have at least two kids, because I wrote "and I have seen a case of shingles in my own child (one of the last kids to not get vaccinated because he got chickenpox from his brother as an infant -- a few more months, and he'd have had the vaccine)".
Ever met anyone paralyzed by polio? I have, at least twice. Ever known anyone whose mom had German measles during the pregnancy? I have. Ever seen a case of shingles? I have.
You anti-vaxxers are selfish and/or ignorant jerks. I don't see any reason to be diplomatic or charitable. These shots are hardly money-makers -- a kid gets about 2 dozen shots in his entire lifetime (remember, I just filled out the medical form for #2 -- he has 22 vaccinations listed, plus an entry noting that he actually had chickenpox. He has had one more vaccination since then, and another due early next year). Compared to the chronic-condition drugs that old farts like me get prescribed, this is chickenfeed. $100 per shot? That's a year or two of most "new" drugs.
Before you claim that other people don't know what they are talking about, you REALLY ought to do your homework. Giving birth didn't turned Jenny McCarthy into a genius, and the same goes for you. No matter how intensely you believe a nutty thing, that still doesn't make it true.
What part don't you get?
The parents aren't actually using any form of critical thinking. For whatever reason (emotional distress, religion) the parents want to believe that they shouldn't get vaccines, or that getting vaccines is the cause of something bad that happened. Or in some cases, something bad happened, and they are looking for a cause. Those people don't care about probability or nuances of genetics and immunity. They want someone to give them a simple answer. They want someone to blame. They want someone to tell them that they are right. They want to feel like they are in control. A million scientists telling them that their child got autism because of random chance, or that no vaccine can be 100% effective, or that strain mutations occur without any prior signs are not even remotely as convincing as one guy --regardless of what degree he might have-- telling them that they are right and vaccines really are bad. You don't even have to support it with experiments, just a folksey-wisdom argument and you're golden.
Never underestimate the power of one person telling someone else what they want to hear.
Are you sure that's the case for vaccines like MMR or MMRV?
Definitely true for the Flu virus - to the point that they need to reformulate yearly because the virus mutates so far. That's also a big reason why there's a yearly flu virus and the flu hasn't been eradicated. If the measles mutated like that, we wouldn't have vaccinated it (virtually) out of existence.
Yes, Viagra had a huge up-front cost and now is a cash cow like so many others. But if the flu vaccine took years for approval and had a huge up-front cost it would be impossible to make and sell.
Is there a lower profit on flu vaccines than viagra? Sure. Is it manufactured solely for the good of mankind? Certainly not.
P.s. pills don't have an unlimited shelf life (though it's typically far longer than the expiration date on the bottle)
You can get rich if you own a politician, but you have to be rich to buy one in the first place.
Our son has autism and was about 4 1/2 when his younger sister was born (his twin sister does not). Our doctor congratulated us when we "decided" to vaccinate our youngest daughter because a lot of parents of a child with autism either are not or have to think about it a lot more than they should. It still makes me mad when I see the Jenny McCarthy types making their money promoting their anti-vax books and then I have to spend time explaining to relatives and friends that Jenny McCarthy doesn't have any real knowledge of science and is probably pretty useless source of information about anything except what kinds of bikinis are popular these days.
When I was a kid, my parents painted every scratch and scrape with mercury antiseptic.
But they don't do that anymore, and they took mercury out of almost all of the vaccinations (the only exception is multi dose flu vaccine, and if you really want, you can pay for the more expensive single-dose shot without preservative)
Some say that autism incidence higher than when I was a kid.
Could it be because kids today are not getting enough mercury?
I'm grateful for your more thoughtful response.
Patents don't really apply to many vaccines, since the rules are different. Merck pretty much has a forever monopoly on MMR, for instance. But Merck is only in the vaccine business because of pressure by the government - so pathetic are the profits. The reason is that the government is by far the largest buyer of vaccines, so they can exert a lot of pricing pressure. I think the government pays under $20 for the same MMR that costs the market over $40.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Because vaccines are not 100% effective. They work because enough people are immunized that it prevents the disease from spreading.
Malaria caused a selection for sickle-cell anemia. The ability to survive does not have to mean survival of the fittest.
One of our strongest attributes is supposed to be our brains and the ability to work out solutions and/or create tools to help us survive adversity. It should be clear by now that if we were to try and survive in the wild without using even the most primitive of tools or our capacity to reason, most of us would fail. Though eventually selection of the physically stronger, faster, tougher and more vicious would probably make us more like our primitive ancestors.
Another consideration is that the children who "SURVIVED" grew up with immunity to diseases like chicken-pox. I chose the vaccine for my daughter because I did not want her to be one of the few who died. It's stupid lottery to play.
By avoiding modern health system, you'd be bringing us back to the Middle Ages. If you cut down the average life expectancy, it won't be effective to properly take care of the children, why send them to college until they're twenty-five when half of them will be dead before they are forty? Eventually we'd all sink to the level of dirt streets and chamber pots being emptied out of people's windows and famines and everyone of us would have a really bad time. Oh, and no Nintendo for you.
BTW, meanwhile, evolution happily churns on, no matter whether you like it or not. You don't have to be worried about that.
Ezekiel 23:20
Exactly how many bubble gum wrappers did you read before you thought you could claim to have researched anything? And yes, just to save time, you are stupid. I think you know that since you were too cowardly to use your name.
You haven't done a shred of research on this, have you?
Vaccines work 85% of the time. If only 15% of the populace is susceptible, the vast majority of diseases will lack the concentration needed to spread across large geographic areas, thus limiting the scope of the outbreak and drastically reducing the number of people involved. For instance: Without humans to spread a disease, most viruses would be a single locale and only get a chance to infect 15% of the people in Sacramento, instead of 15% of people in North America.
Then, if you were thinking logically... or just thinking... then you'd realize that at the beginning, the vaccine would give the first person an 85% chance of immunity. The "herd" immunity would be unchanged, because it's just one guy. As that number went from 1 person to 99% of people, the overall "herd" immunity would reach 85%. I don't know how this is at all illogical to you. Unless you never even tried to understand.
See:
http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4283
Huffington Post has been classified as the n. 10 worst anti-science website due to its promotion of crack-pot medicine, including the alleged vaccine-autism link.
You're totally right dude! Don't have kids and there will be less selfish idiots who value their personal liberty to not receive a vaccine over the importance of a clear-cut public health issue. Thanks so much!
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Or agree with him that he doesn't have a problem while he's puking his guts out in the gutter, or do you do any and everything possible to see that he doesn't hurt either himself or others around him. Suffering fools lightly only results in even more insufferable fools in the future.
Many of the vaccines still contain aluminium, which can be toxic in the bloodstream. Although that's actually the whole reason it's there. By adding the aluminium the body's immune system will react more strongly and so less viral material is needed.
It's kind of like how for bull riding competitions they put a belt on the bull that causes pain to piss it off. This ensures a better show as otherwise the bull might not care enough to buck the rider off.
There is some concern though about whether when giving a young child a barrage of vaccines all at once it could be pushing the toxicity level higher than necessary. The method my family has chosen to mitigate this is to spread the shots out a bit.
So far the only one I think we are outright skipping is Chickenpox. It seems like every child I know who has recieved the vaccine has ended up with chickenpox more than once. It appears to not give much in the way of lasting immunity and could possibly be setting us up for a large adult population that isn't immune. The majority of deaths from chickenpox have been from secondary infections due to poor sanitary practices.
So the system can tolerate a certain failure rate. Just figure that part of that failure rate includes people who refuse the vaccination.
Presently, there is no cost to opting out of vaccinations. So the fear is that parents will forgo the (slight) risk of side effects by selecting the zero cost option (no vaccination). Simple solution: Make sure that parents of unvaccinated children incur the cost of their decision through either higher insurance rates or a reduction in the income tax exemption for their child.
Have gnu, will travel.
What, we aren't just listing unrelated, off-topic items?
And that's why they need educated.
With apologies to Ron White, you can't fix stupid. There's not a class you can take or a pill you can eat.
Unfortunately, parasites want to leach off of everyone else instead of going away to where they won't damage the functional members of society.
Dropping into the third-person eh?
From Wikipedia: Eugenics is the "applied science or the bio-social movement which advocates the use of practices aimed at improving the genetic composition of a population", usually a human population.
No need for artificial-selection - your practice of non-vaccination is a practice aimed at blah blah blah.
From the Oxford English dictionary: the science of improving a population by controlled breeding to increase the occurrence of desirable heritable characteristics.
Again, you would like the breeding population to drop vaccination, with the hope that some gene for resistance to diseases is inherited (notwithstanding the fact we tried that for a few thousand years before vaccines came along).
You quack like a duck.
Maybe in another 20 years you will grasp reality.
For the same reason car insurance is mandatory, some things just have to be.
he is a human. Apparently you consider yourself an entitled two-legged tick who just hangs onto humanity and takes everything they can.
The risks of vaccines are well documented and so are the benefits. And the benefits of vaccination massively outweigh the risks of not doing so.
Self-entitled, spoiled brats like to have temper tantrums when the adults ask them to do their share, but there is no way they would actually leave if it meant they couldn't sponge off of everyone else.
In these cases, I think the person has a tendency to cling to their beliefs. Because changing the beliefs entails coming to terms with what they did (in this case, causing many deaths).
Simple Solution:
In order for a parent to opt-out on a vaccination for their child, they have to pay for the vaccination of another child (presumably from a low-income family).
At least we'd get something out of the idiots who refuse, and the offset of "child of idiot refuser" to "under-privileged child who might not have been vaccinated otherwise" might equalize the herd immunity rates.
It's not good profit if there are more profitable things to do with your money.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
You're going to shit your pants when you find out what table salt is made of.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Maybe if they stopped using toxic mercury metal in some vaccines people would trust them more. Do you know how mercury damages brain neurons? Look it up. Don't inject that shit into my kids.
Well, yeah, if it was only very small minority refusing vaccinations. The point is that vaccination refusal is becoming common enough that the system can no longer tolerate it. There will always be wingnuts, and as long as they're few in number, they're not really a problem. But when wingnut thinking becomes mainstream, we're all in trouble.
The idiots will kill all of us at some point. They've never heard of the herd immunity? What could happen is that the unvaccinated kids just die off while those who got the vaccination will thrive. I think the world could do without a lot of idiots.
it's not mandatory if you do not drive.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
The amount of stupid in this post is outrageous. I can't decide whether or not to vote it funny or troll.
He only used measles as an example. An aggregate of all now preventable disease deaths would.
Here's your citation.
https://imfar.confex.com/imfar/2010/webprogram/Paper7336.html
YOU LOSE.
Not even a try, let alone a nice one.
Water found to be wet, shit to stink, and the cake is a lie.
Just to reinforce your point...
Dr. Jonas Salk was the man who came up with the polio vaccine. He could have patented it and become rich beyond his wildest dreams.
And yet he did not. In fact, when Ed Murrow interviewed him and asked "who owns the patent?", do you know what Dr. Salk's response was?
"No one. Could you patent the sun?"
Bless that man's heart. Saving his fellow human beings from a lifetime of paralysis - regardless of their gender, race, creed, or religion - was all the compensation he needed. Surely, if anyone rests in peace, it is him.
:(){
Please explain for all the stupid people in the room how, if student A is vaccinated but student B is not, that this will make student A sick.
From the top of my head:
Vaccine aren't 100% efficient. There might by a few case where the student received the vaccine but didn't develop the antibodies. (Just an example: if you're sick with a fever, there's a risk that the ongoing inflammation will destroy the vaccine content (through macrophages) before antibodies are developped (through lymphocytes))
There might be student aren't anti-vaxx but who aren't up-to-date just yet (they missed a dose or whatever).
There are people who have a compromised immune system (that's an example from TFA) and can't get vaccinated.
There are people who have allergies and for whom the vaccine might be risky (another example from TFA). (As an example: for practical purpose, flu vaccines are grown on eggs. If you're allergic to the egg proteins, no shot for you, even if you're not anti-vaxx).
There are people who have been vaccinated but can't momentarily fight the disease due to a compromised immune system (AIDS, or even disease as simple as mononucleosis can momentarily b0rk the immune system).
etc.
(Case in point: with some disease (like the flu) it's better to vaccinate the population which is at risk of spreading the disease, rather than the group which is at risk of the disease - it better to vaccinate the care taking/nursing/medical personal, rather than the weak elderly patients.)
You end-up with a bunch of people who aren't anti-vaxx, but which still aren't protected against the disease.
- If the number of non vaccinated people is underneath a specific treshold. Nothing happens. When somebody gets the disease due to complex unlucky circumstances, nothing happens, because chances are the sick person will never meet another susceptible person. The disease just can't manage to find enough victims to spread among.
- If the number of non vaccinated people rises above a specific treshold, the shit hits the fan: the disease get a big enough and dense enough population among which to spread. There's a far greater chance that the disease in one sick person will get a chance to meet a susceptible person to whom to jump. Disease which were taught to be almost eradicated suddenly appear again and run epidemic.
By being selfish and refusing to vaccine, anti-vaxx will raise this number above the treshold. They will not only pose a danger to themselves, but to the population as a whole including all the "innocent" categories cited before who weren't anti-vaxx, but will suffer because of the anti-vaxx.
In a completely selfish way, it makes sense for the anti-vaxx to refuse the vaccine: vaccine aren't perfect and there very slight chance of secondary effect (ranging from simple inconvenience to more serious effect). Even rarest problem don't have a rate of absolutely zero but slightly above. And if the disease is almost eradicated chance, the chance to catch is are nearly zero.
But that behaviour is really dangerous for the community because as a consequence of it, the number of susceptible people is at risk at passing the treshold. They end up making the chance to catch the disease non-zero. By just wanting to avoid a statistically really rare inconvenience, they put the community at a bigger risk.
The example is the polio. In theory it has been recently almost eradicated, chance of catching it are nearly non existant. But vaccine against polio isn't a synthetic product, but a "stunned" virus. There a very slight but not completely null chance to develop a serious effect, something like a polio (sorry I don't remember if it was either because the virus wasn't stunned enough, or because the immune system was compromised).
So the reasoning inside the head of anti-vaxx goes "chance of problems with vaccine > chance of problems with polio" therefore "don't get the vaccine".
But the problem is that, in consequence of just a reasoning, the treshold has b
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Your: I am dependent on evolution to cull the vulnerable so that future generations are immune to each disease naturally, matches pretty well with Wikipedia's: advocates the use of practices aimed at improving the genetic composition of a population, from where I'm standing.
Anyhow, I see you're a brand-new user who's previously never posted. Others have already moderated you down to 0 (harsh, but fair, on a site with a scientific approach to life) and I'm just giving you the oxygen of attention. Good luck with making "anti-dysgenicsm" anything other than, in reality, eugenics.
One final definition: "irreverent": showing a lack of respect for people or things that are generally taken seriously (my emboldening). You throw around words and phrases like "poison", "cull the vulnerable", "cocktails of poison", "crap", "toxic", "natural lottery", "destined to die", "medical industrial complex" and then expect to be taken seriously. No, I don't think I was being irreverent.
You need to stop reading pharmaceutical literature. The numbers of "doesn't take" and "not 100% effective", not to mention "has lost vaccinated immunity" are grossly out of sync with the numbers in your post.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
One of the flaws of US primary education, is that the inmates (bug-fuck crazy fundies and anti-government wack-jobs) run the assylums (school districts). With one of the two political parties taking great pride in short-circuiting and actively trying to destroy rational, nationally consistent public education (because an dumb populace is easier to manipulate), the return of disease is only one of many brutal consequences of paranoia, self-interest, and goodly bit of racism.
Disconnect from the emotion of this issue and try to think logically and I will too.
If vaccines allegedly protect children from viruses by infecting them,
And a child A has been vaccinated,
how can child B who has not been vaccinated be a threat to a protected child?
And is not Child A a threat to child B because Child A is carrying a live virus?
Do they not report that sometimes innoculations will actually cause the very outcome which they are designed to protect against?
Do you really have a good basis to trust your government?
How do you know that what they are putting inside you isn't intended to make you more controllable?
I would defend myself against innoculations as strongly as if someone were coming at me with a knife.
That's just how I think of it.
We've been conditioned to be very emotional about this issue. I hope we can someday lay aside the emotion and rationally discuss this.
Meaning, if you don't want to vaccinate your kids, that's your right, but you shouldn't be allowed to send them to school...
Story title: "Study Finds Unvaccinated Students Putting Other Students At Risk"
I suppose this means vaccination is not effective.
"In 2008, a measles outbreak spread in California. It was traced to a child whose parents had decided not to vaccinate him. He brought the disease back from Europe, infecting other children at his doctor's office and his classmates."
This begs the question, were the other children and classmates that got infected, vaccinated but still got sick anyhow? Or were all of the people who got sick not vaccinated?
While vaccinations are essential, miracles of modern science, I would still like to know what the data is on effectiveness per vaccine formulation variation and so on. For example, I've read the current whooping cough vaccine is weaker and therefore less effective than its predecessor that had some minor side effects in some people.
I wouldn't say that vaccines aren't profitable. What I will say is that they're closer to computer equipment profit margins(1%), not jewelry store ones(50+%) like designer drugs have.
Then why develop a vaccine for Chicken Pox? The rate of complications from the vaccine is comparable to the rate of complications from the disease (at least it was with the stats a few years ago). Worse, while catching chicken pox gives lifelong immunity but having the vaccine only gives ~10 years of protection (again this was as of several years ago when the vaccine was newer) so boosters are needed. However what is really terrible is that chicken pox is far more serious if you catch it as an adult. So if the vaccine immunity wears off and you forget to have a booster as an adult you can end up with a far more serious case of shingles.
The WHO used to primarily recommend the vaccine for developed countries only as a way to reduce lost productivity due to child care while a kid had the chicken pox disease. So if drug companies do not make money from vaccines why on earth did they invent this one? There are far more important diseases out there with serious health implications - why target a relatively innocuous disease, especially one which is far more serious as an adult? Our family has had every vaccination that is recommended except for this one but when our doctor suggested that we might want to skip this one until the kids were older in order to give them a chance to catch chicken pox we thought that this was strange advice and looked up why.
If we had to prove technologies were safe before we started using them fire would have never been accepted and we'd still be living in cold dark caves eating raw meat.
Well not a crime against humanity, but I certain would consider a child who wasn't vaccinated due to personal belief against a disease, who then got the disease would be chargeable for child neglect. After all if it's God's will your that your child gets a disease or not, then it follows that if you go to prison if the un-vaccinated child gets ill, then it's God's will that your sorry ass rots away in prison.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Last year we were getting free vaccinations from our work place but you had to sign up for them. One of my co-workers op-ed out stating that he didn't "believe in vaccines". I responded, "Vaccines aren't ghosts. You don't get to NOT believe in them.".
Very good explanation.
One way to think about "group immunity" it is to compare disease spread to a nuclear reactor. Push in the control rods until one slow neutron produces less than one new one on the average and the reaction peters out. Pull them out until it produces more than one and the reaction grows exponentially. Same with a case of disease causing more or less than one new case on the average.
Another way to think about it is that only the susceptible population matters for disease transmission. The immune are just background (like furniture) who might carry contagion on their surface until they're cleaned or it degrades, but won't generate new bugs. If there are too few potential victims the disease peters out, just as if there were only so few people wandering around in a wilderness that a sick person, while contagious, encounters less than one other person on the average.
Too many skipping the vaccination means the population of susceptibles becomes dense enough for an epidemic to occur. If only those who skipped out got sick the rest of us wouldn't care. But I hear the no-immunity-developed rate for typical vaccinations is often the two-digit percentages. So a lot of people could be hurt if a disease gets going again. Further, even if the multiplier on the exponential IS above one, the higher it is the faster the disease spreads. So keeping it down makes it possible to contain and extinguish occasional outbreaks (with supplemental vaccinations, quarantine, increased sanitation, reduced interpersonal contact, and other public health measures), as was done late in the elimination of smallpox. Anti-vaxx ideologues and their victims defeat this, as well.
Re: Polio: For a long time there were two types of vaccine: Salk and Sabin. (These days there may be more. Like something assembled from biotech-generated virus components made without any actual virus involved.)
Salk was the first: It was made of killed virus. The surface proteins provoke the immune reaction. It has a slight risk of producing full-blown polio, if some virus doesn't get killed. (In the very early days there was a significant amount of that: Turns out the virus crystalizes under some conditions. When that happens the virus in the middle of the crystal doesn't all get killed. Oops! They got that figured out pretty quick and made sure the conditions weren't right in the killing stage. Meanwhile, even with a few cases caused by early defective batches of vaccine, they were still ahead of the then-rampant natural transmission.)
Sabin was the second. It is a "weakened virus", a live, mutated, version of the virus that doesn't cause paralysis. (Think of polio as a cold that happens to look enough like motor nerves that, once you've had it, your body now thinks motor nerves are a disease and attacks them. Sabin vaccine gives you the cold, doesn't look enough like nerves to give you paralysis, but DOES look enough like wild polio that if you've had one you're immune to the other. Just like cowpox vs. smallpox.) It was preferred because actually having a disease gives much longer-lasting immunity than just being exposed to its components (plus an "adjuvant" to do enough damage to signal the body something is bad.) Also: As a live virus it is contagious. Thus the immunization is also contagious. If a few kids in a school don't get the vaccine, they may still get the "cold". And it doesn't need to be injected - just eat the sugar cube with the pink drop on it. The risk is that, very occasionally, the virus may mutate BACK into real, paralytic polio - and spread.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Tell me, how well did your theory pan out during the heyday of polio and smallpox?
The biggest problem with that anti-vax movement is that the herd immunity protects not just the unvaccinated that the infected mingle with both those that get the disease third hand. People like young babies that can't get a vaccination because they are too young.
Babies that wouldn't normally get whooping cough or measles or such because they were exposed to it because a sibling or parent (who was probably vaccinated) was exposed to a disease they then carried home.
If we're starting to stop people from smoking in bars because of second hand smoke we sure as hell can force most everyone to be vaccinated because of third hand infections.
Again, tell me, how well do you think your solution would have worked during the heyday of smallpox, or polio?
Yeah. Ask anyone who's ever had to get a 'booster' shot (pretty much everyone, if they've gone to the doctor and been tested for it) how effective their first shot was. You know, the first shot that was supposed to give them life-long immunity.
Booster shots exist precisely because numerous types of vaccine are well-understood to *not* confer lifelong immunity. Tetanus immunizations, for instance, generally last for 10 years.
I'm not sure where you came under the impression that all vaccinations are "supposed to give [you] life-long immunity", but that's simply just not the case: you appear to be confused, or misinformed.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
Almost every person with a healthy natural immune system exposed to Poliovirus will brush it off with no symptoms and gain additional lifelong protection.
Wrong.
in fact, a strong immune system increases the risk of paralysis. The virus masquerades as nerve sheathes to try to delay immune system response by triggering a mechanism that protects motor nerves. If the immune system isn't fooled it will often go on to attack motor nerves as well, which is what causes the paralysis. (It's similar to Multiple Sclerosis, which can develop from an allergy to cow's milk.)
5% [of those exposed] will have mild symptoms such as fever. Paralysis occurs in 1 of every 1000 of this 5%, and it's theorized that this group has genetic and anatomic susceptibility.
Whose behind did you pull those numbers out of? The CDC's MMWR has the fraction of paralytic vs. non-paralytic cases (in the years they distinguished them before the vaccines started knocking the numbers down) running in the 35%-48% range, not the 0.01% you claim. Given that, I also chose to reject your 5% number for "any noticeable symptoms at all among those exposed."
A polio victim's organization has a fine summary of those numbers, for those who don't want to look up decades of CDC reports and do their own math.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Drunk driving vs. flu deaths? Wow....
I wish people would stop comparing vaccines with things wildly unrelated.
He was comparing the number of deaths annually from something that is largely preventable. If you can't see how those things are related, then you have no business commenting on here.
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/health-conditions/neurological-conditions/autism/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-mark-hyman/autism-research-discovery_b_794967.html
Another indirect datapoint about the link between autism an vitamin D deficiency: http://www.futurity.org/health-medicine/higher-autism-risk-for-march-conception/
It may also turn out that some children are better at dealing with excreting heavy metals and other toxins than others for whatever reasons. See also Dr. David Brownstein on Iodine and Dr. Joel Fuhrman on vegetables and children's nutrition.
A book on dealing with tough times when all else fails:
"Dark Nights Of The Soul: A Guide To Finding Your Way Through Life's Ordeals"
http://books.google.com/books?id=RKZreNYKNHQC
Good luck!
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
My point was that coercion is not harmony. It is violence. It is immoral and unjust, the polar opposite of harmony. I will believe this until the day I die.
I'm sorry, but your conclusion is completely off base here. Society having rules for being part of society is NOT coercion. It is part of a people's right to self-determination.
Oh, I grasp it. The solution to human nature is coercion. Violence. Threats. Physical force. Am I right? It sure works for the animal kingdom.
But there's absolutely none of that at play here. So your conclusion is completely wrong.
"Your right to swing your fist ends at the tip of my nose. Not having your kid eat whole mainly nutritious foods like Dr. Joel Fuhrman outlines in "Disease-Proof Your Child: Feeding Kids Right" and "Super Immunity: The Essential Nutrition Guide for Boosting Your Body's Defenses to Live Longer, Stronger, and Disease Free", or not breastfeeding for the first two to four years, or not getting plentiful sleep, or not getting lots of outdoor exercise in the sunlight plus supplemental vitamin D, or not getting enough iodine and omega-3s, or not homeschooling and working from home to avoid disease transmission centers like schools and workplaces, or not living in a relatively stress-free home exposes mine to potentially life-threatening disease because yours has an immune system working less than optimally. If you think that the (vanishingly small) risk of complications from living a healthy lifestyle or short-term difficulties of breaking out of the "pleasure trap" your family is stuck in ( http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx ) is more important than my (well-nourished) kid's risk of contracting a disease that has mutated inside your (poorly fed) kid.. well, you're bad at math. And, a selfish short-sighted asshole.
I've never really understood why it is that something you were going to do anyway becoming mandatory means that you should automatically resist it. You've lost nothing except the choice you weren't going to make, and society has benefited. Making eating well and getting good sleep and playing outdoors in the sunshine and so forth mandatory is not the same as Hitler storming across Europe, get a grip. If the slope were really that slippery, we would have fallen down into the abyss a long long time ago.
Obligatory car analogy: Sure, you have the right to drive around with faulty brakes. At least in this state, you do not need working brakes to pass the yearly inspection. You can argue that you're risking nobody except yourself.. except, you're not. Your passengers, and the other people on the roads that you slam into because you can't stop, would disagree.
Part of living in a civilized society is recognizing when your actions have consequences for others that have no say in the matter. Yes, you can make the choice not to feed your kid really well or to send your kid daily to a disease transmission center like a public or private school. But realize that your actions have consequences for others. (It may come as a shock to you that there are other people in the world besides you and your child.) One of the major problems we (USA) have as a society is the attitude of "I've got mine, fuck you." Take responsibility for your choice; keep your kid away from mine. If your idealism leads to my kid's death.. then it's not worth protecting. Die for your ideals if you want; it's your life to throw away."
FTFY.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Your an idiot.
Injectng mercury is a far cry from biological digestion, and the results are not even close chemically, or the causality that results from the delivery systems to the neurological systems vs DNA damage.
Totally different issues and either one could be the cause for the rise in autism. (Vaccines vs Increase in seafood products/by products in food manufacturing.)
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
If we don't vaccinate everyone, the pharma companies lose profits.
There is absolutely no reason to get vaccines unless there is a outbreak in progress. Genomics has show us that outbreaks of viral diseases require elaborate and extensive study in populations to create a vaccine in an outbreak.
Getting a Vaccine for a season is a marketing ploy, and will not help at all if there is no acute outbreak in the general population.
When you see hospitals nation wide filling up, by all means, get a vaccine.
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
"Your an idiot."
Possibly, but at least I can spell. Seriously, do you open all your conversations like that?
"Injectng mercury is a far cry from biological digestion, and the results are not even close chemically, or the causality that results from the delivery systems to the neurological systems vs DNA damage."
Injection and digestion are different, and the effects are potentially different. However, if you actually bother to look it up, you'll find that ingested methylmercury is absorbed readily and completely by the gastrointestinal tract, so there's not really that much difference between drinking methylmercury and shooting it up. And no chemical difference. Now, methyl mercury, which is most of what you get from water and fish, is not the same thing as thimerosal, which is the preservative used in some vaccines. but the OP was afraid of "mercury," not any particular kind of mercury.
I can't address the second part of your run on sentence because it doesn't make sense.
No, actually. Thimerosal is almost certainly (as very, very, very, very likely) not in any way linked to autism. There have been a LOT of studies on that, due to the fraudulent and unethical work of Dr. Wakefield and the ensuing hooplah. As someone else pointed out, thimerosal was even removed from most vaccines some time ago, and that had no effect whatsoever on autism rates.
I'm not aware of any specific research looking at methylmercury exposure (from fish) and autism. Methylmercury poisoning can produce lowered IQ and attention problems. I don't know if it's ever been linked to more autism-like symptoms. However, a quick glance at some numbers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epidemiology_of_autism) doesn't show any obvious trend to increased autism rates in fish eating countries, not even in Japan (a high fish consuming nation) where methylmercury pollution has been a huge problem.
Oh, do you write a medical column in a newspaper or magazine?
If they mad 5 cents per vaccination they would be that profitable with so many people using them.
And I bet they make a hell of a lot more, this is even ignoring research money.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
i think youll find that modern sewage systems had a much more profound impact on the spread of disease than vaccines.
By CDC numbers, 96% of the US population has received the pertussis vaccine. The vaccine is '71-85% effective' according to a search engine summary of the pertussis Wikipedia page.
Let us imagine environmentally exposing 1,000 people to the disease: say the chance of acquiring this disease being 10%, 96% of the people are vaccinated, and the vaccine is completely effective 75% of the time (75% effective), completely useless otherwise.
Without the vaccine, a similar 1,000 exposed people would have 100 acquiring and suffering from the disease..
With a 96% vaccination rate, 960 of the 1,000 exposed would have had the vaccine (vs. 40 that have not). 10% acquiring the disease is again 100 people. Of those 100 infections, the breakdown would now be 96 vaccinated vs. 4 non-vaccinated people.
Of 96 vaccinated people, only 75% are effectively vaccinated -> 96 x 0.75 = 72, so the remaining 24 are no better off than not having been vaccinated at all.
This means there are 24 + 4 = 28 total infected and suffering people. 24 vaccinated folks amongst 28 means 85% of infected and suffering people were vaccinated. In comparison though, 72% of those suffering from infections in the 1,000 no-vaccine scenario are prevented in the 96% vaccination scenario (96% x 75%).
This, of course, is meant to be entirely illustrative, but the point should be evident: the expectation is that vaccinated people will be over-represented in samples where the population's vaccination levels are high and the vaccine is less than 100% effective.
!Equality through palindromes semordnilap hguorht ytilauqE!
I think you'll find modern sewage systems actually spread the SARS virus. A vaccine would have been better.
http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2003/pr70/en/
Need Mercedes parts ?
" I'm sorry, I fail to see the similarities between optional alternative "therapies" and a mandatory government-required system of vaccinations of which any and all profits roll into the same large companies. If the program was not profitable, the drug companies wouldn't produce the vaccines -- their boards of directors would shoot them (and they'd be legally fiscally accountable to their shareholders & boards for running a program at a deficit for decades...). So you have to assume that it brings in some type of profit -- or the companies wouldn't produce them. "
That's not how it works. The government, in the form of an NIH/CDC proceeding, will identify a vaccine that, say, everyone needs to get. Then they call the drug companies in and have a little talk and basically say this is what we need, how much. If they price is more than reasonable they suggest it's national security and they'll be taking the plant and the army will make it now how much and they agree on a price and they roll out the vaccine.
It's best not to talk about things you know nothing about; passing on a hypothesis as fact isn't such a great idea either.
Need Mercedes parts ?
Links in my earlier comment: http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3068759&cid=41115073
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
"Alternate hypothesis ; anti-vaxxers are actually a shadowy conspiracy of the radical Green movement who want the human race thinning out a bit to lower our impact on Mother Earth."
From some of the other activities I know of from the radical greens, ARs, and suchlike, there is probably more than a tad of fact in that hypothesis. Their goals are often the "unintended consequences", not the obvious.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
If these abysmally stupid parents, who get their science info from a Playboy model and a thoroughly discredited "researcher" who was in cahoots with a lawyer in a cynical scheme to make money were just taking themselves from the gene pool, that would be a general plus for humanity.
Unfortunately, they are endangering their children, other people's children, and other adults with their stupidity.
In my mind, a parent that refuses to get their eligible child vaccinated, is as guilty of child abuse as a parent who deliberately harms their child, or refuses to get their child treatment for an easily treated condition that is otherwise fatal. Child abusers all.
Otherwise I have no strong feelings on the matter.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
It's so not-profitable that the government has to pull on Merck to keep making them.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Have all comments that may have a thread of opinion against vaccines been censored? /. with a -1 filter, shouldn't I get all the nasty stuff and trolls and everything in between?
That is, unless there's something about discussions that I don't understand...
I'm browsing
You may very well have good points, but I've already said that I support making the vaccines free as part of any legislation making them mandatory.
In my state (PA), each county has a health department. In mine, you call your local clinic, make an appointment, and go get your free shots. If the local clinic is not working out for you (weird hours, etc), there are also community clinics that aren't free, but are very low-cost. Without doing too much research, I see that there is a clinic in my county that will do immunizations for $15 a pop.
I have no idea what it's like to be on Medicaid, and I'm sure it sucks. I don't want to minimize what poor people have to go through. That said, there is charity care available. It probably shouldn't be made too great, or other people would take advantage of it without really needing it. You have to balance people's genuine need for charity with people's innate ability to leach the system. It's a very difficult problem.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Have you EVER SEEN an epidemic? Do you know what polio does to people?
Do you know how many millennia that Measles ravaged the population?
You think that somehow immunity to Measles will magically appear when you stop giving vaccines? What?!?
Measles, smallpox, rubella, scarlet fever, etc killed almost 40% of children before the age of 5 just 80 years ago.
You WANT this?
Vaccines are the primary reason that life expectancy increased from 45 to 70+. Antibiotics being the other... Do you advocate for the elimination of those as well? After all, the negative effects of their overuse are actually far more relevant than those of vaccines...
Wow..... I'm stunned. I prefer to chalk it up to ignorance, rather than malice... I hope I'm right.
Look at all the new vaccines big pharma has been pushing on the public.
What about the stupidity in giving so many vaccines at once, increasing the likelihood of adverse reactions ?
What about the adjutants IN the vaccines ?
What about the fact that conferred immunity lasts, whereas vaccine immunity does not ?
Rarely do people ask the pertinent questions when the rallying cry of "won't somebody think of the children" has shut down skepticism, and most people's minds.
We have a huge federal government that has failed to properly regulate, that is corrupted by industry, and that wields power and authority primarily to deceive the public. We have massive programs to finance "research" that yields nothing most of the time, and we have a media that panders consistently to the lowest common denominators in society.
Nobody should be surprised that people have failed to vaccinate their kids for the most common diseases, when they've no experience with them, and nobody should be surprised that people eschew all vaccines, when the number of vaccines that are being foisted on the public has increased so markedly.
Blind faith in medical authority is just as irrational and inane as religious faith.
Please look at the link you supplied:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_D#Toxicity
"For infants (birth to 12 months), the tolerable upper limit (maximum amount that can be tolerated without harm) is set at 25 micrograms/day (1000 IU). One thousand micrograms (40,000 IU) per day in infants has produced toxicity within one month.[80]"
So, after some body gave an infant 100X the RDA every day for a month, the infant showed signs of toxicity. I'd venture the signs of toxicity probably went away when they stopped supplementing (given the examples I cites about East German infants getting massive doses and going on to win the Olympics). If an infant 100X the RDA for iron, in one day they might be dead? Based on that comparison, vitamin D is a very safe supplement for children. The health consequences of getting one tenth the RDA are far greater than getting 10X the RDA. Error here is much better on the side of abundance.
Still, for infants, I'd agree the US RDA is more or less correct, and there is probably no reason to ever give an amount about the RDA. Based on what I've cited from Dr. John Cannell's writings, the fears of what happens near that limit are overblown. And the "official" recommendations remain way too low for adults, as it is not much more than infants, and your comparisons while plausible sounding don't match the science, because vitamin D is used in every cell for signaling more than for "growth". (Even ignoring the RDAs are just probably wrong for lots of things -- his chatter on RDAs is all too true:
http://forums.welltrainedmind.com/showthread.php?t=329928 )
The bottom line is that humans are adapted to a life outdoors in the sun. That includes pregnant women getting enough sun. We deviate from that norm at the risk of our own health, and it is only in the past few decades that so many of us have become indoor creatures, with health consequences probably including autism. Some culture clashes even make that worse, like devout Somali Muslim women moving from near the equator where they lived in houses with open courtyards to northern latitudes around Minneapolis where they stay indoors all the times and wear a Burka otherwise, and then people wonder why so many of their children are autistic (as they do not know yet to supplement with 6000 IU D3 daily when pregnant and nursing):
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=vitamin-d-and-autism
"What If Vitamin D Deficiency Is a Cause of Autism? A few researchers are turning their attention to the sunshine vitamin as a culprit, prompted by the experience of immigrants that have moved from their equatorial country to two northern latitude locations"
P.S. I did not call you an "idiot" that I could see. But on this one issue, you are certainly echoing the conventional wisdom that has caused so much suffering over the past few decades (including bad advice we got from our own pediatrician). Good luck in finding the right amount of vitamin D3 that works for you and your family.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.