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Uptick In Whooping Cough Linked To Subpar Vaccines
sciencehabit writes "Whooping cough, or pertussis, has exploded in the United States in recent years. A new study (abstract) confirms what scientists have suspected for some time: The return of the disease is caused by the introduction of new, safer vaccines 2 decades ago. Although they have far fewer side effects, the new shots don't offer long-lived protection the way older vaccines do."
If neither vaccine was effective, there would have been no change. However, there was an observed uptick, indicating that the previous vaccine was definitely having an effect.
Vaccines have a great reputation, largely resulting from the highly successful campaigns with smallpox and polio. However, these were done in a less litigious era, and unlike today's medical practice, they could operate without the fear of gigantic lawsuits if something went wrong.
These reduced-effectiveness vaccines are like many "safer", "greener", or otherwise "less harmful" solutions; they have their drawbacks, but only a fool would try to push their solution by advertising those drawbacks. Now we're seeing two effects. A re-emergence of pertussis, and decreased public confidence in vaccines.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
Well of course they aren't. That's why we still have 10% of the population dying from smallpox and polio ... right?
Or, maybe vaccines aren't effective period. Just a thought.
I guess that would explain all these horrible outbreaks of polio, mumps, and measles we've been having....
Oh, wait, we aren't having large outbreaks of these diseases? Well, then I guess vaccines work.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
I wonder when it will become mainstream for our vaccinations to be based in part on nanotechnology to further the delivery and the effectiveness of vaccinations and our ability to stimulate our immune system towards fighting these diseases.
you have proof the DNA of the disease is the same then as now?
they might have that proof, actually.
but more than that they have the last years stats of the people who were vaccinated 20+ years ago. presumably the change didn't happen overnight either so there would be some overlap there as well where some age group got either one.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Or maybe people should stop refusing to have their child vaccinated because of $CONSPIRACYTHEORY. Just a thought.
Or maybe people should stop refusing to have their child vaccinated because of $CONSPIRACYTHEORY. Just a thought.
Why do you hate natural selection?
The vaccine debate is a religious one on both sides and your statement is evidence of that. The data suggesting that vaccines are working is overwhelming and trying to deny that they have worked is ridiculous. There is also risk to vaccines and they can cause harm and trying to deny that is ridiculous. The bigger question is whether or not over use of vaccines is creating a similar problem as the overuse of antibiotics. And in the process are we actually reducing our ability to adapt as a species to environmental pressure and stress.
Or, maybe vaccines aren't effective period. Just a thought.
I suggest you try thinking harder next time.
Smallpox would still be around if they didn't work, and other diseases would be much more common.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Couldn't they just give the safe one first and the older, more effective one a few months later? And if not, why not just do the weaker one yearly? I think an elegant solution for a lot of these weaker vaccines is to simply do them yearly, around the same time you get your flu shot. Other than further aggravating the Jenny McCarthys of the world, I think this would be a fine solution.
With population exploding, shouldn't we return to an era where the weak were culled out?...
Unless you live in Africa, population is not exploding. The population growth rate is slowing, the UN predicts that the world population will stabilize around 2090 and fall afterwards. Most (more recent) predictions think that this estimate is pessimistic - it's looking like population will stabilize around 2050 and decline afterwards.
Most industrialized nations have negative population growth already, the US *would* have negative population growth if you discount immigration. Even with immigration, the US population is slowing and will turn the corner sometime in the next couple of decades.
... back in the day old people had the grace to die of diabetes or a heart attack, now they live until 90, but don't work the last 30 years of their lives, effectively eating the seed corn of the new generation.
I think the problems you are seeing is due to a lack of an evolved sense of morality. On your part.
Google "herd immunity".
Our "ability to adapt as a species" would mean simply letting people die if they weren't already immune. Unless you're aware of some Lamarkian pressure I don't know about.
Use of vaccines does create a selective pressure for vaccines to adapt, which is why they're used for the most dangerous diseases or in the most at-risk groups, or so broadly that a disease doesn't have a chance to adapt before it loses all of its possible niches. Adios, smallpox. Time to get your coat, polio.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Or, maybe vaccines aren't effective period. Just a thought.
I guess that would explain all these horrible outbreaks of polio, mumps, and measles we've been having....
Oh, wait, we aren't having large outbreaks of these diseases? Well, then I guess vaccines work.
No, they don't.
See, what has happened is that folks who are naturally immune have peed in water. Now, since the essence of their immunity has gone into the water, we have been drinking the homeopathic cure!
But don't tell anyone! The homeopathic industry needs their revenue for all the R&D they have to prove the effectiveness of their products with their scientific studies.
Like this one:
"Drink this Homeopathic medicine for your sickness. Do you fell better?"
"Yep!"
"There you go! A 100% effectiveness rate!"
Population is not exploding. Hell without immigration the USA would have a negative growth rate. Even China and India's growth rates are slowing, very few nations have exploding population rates.
Do you get your children vaccinated?
It's much more likely that your child will have a bad reaction to the vaccine than to actually get the disease. And if everyone *else* gets vaccinated, there's no need for any specific child to take that risk. That's the dilemma facing parents nowadays - from their individual viewpoint, there's a higher risk from the vaccination than there is from the disease.
Taking polio (about 30 years ago) as an example, the chance of getting polio from the vaccine was about 1 in 750,000. Polio became largely non-existent in the US during the later years of the vaccination program, so individually it's easy to see why parents might not want to take the risk.
And yet if everyone makes the best choice for their personal welfare, polio runs rampant in the country with 35,000 cases per year.
This is a variant of the Prisoner's dilemma, where if everyone does what's in their immediate best interest then everyone suffers needlessly.
We must accept the fact that sometimes we forced to take risks, and sometimes those risks will go badly. The risks are structured such that by taking the forced risk we are lowering everyone's total risk, and in the case of diseases, lowering it to a point where eventually no one will have to take the risk in the future.
Whatever. I still don't support homeopathic marriages or adoptions.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Sure it may, but why think that without evidence. Do you see any correlation between vaccines and anti-biotics that we don't?
Please elaborate. My understanding is that antibiotics work in the role of parts of your immune system where vaccines work by triggering parts of your immune system. It doesn't seem like that the same logic would apply.
>>- back in the day old people had the grace to die of diabetes or a heart attack, now they live until 90, but don't work the last 30 years of their lives, effectively eating the seed corn of the new generation.
If you're able and society needs you to work, then you should work, even in the last "30 years of your life" and even if you've done far more than provide for your own retirement.
Good human beings don't live solely for themselves--they also work to help others out.
However, I'm NOT in favor of the masses continuing to work all the way to death solely so that the 1% can pile more gold up onto their hoards.
--PM
"All natural, no dyes. That's a good business - all-natural children's toys. Those toy companies, they don't arbitrarily mark up their frogs. They don't lie about how much they spend on research and development. And the worst that a toy company can be accused of is making a really boring frog. Gribbit, gribbit, gribbit. You know another really good business? Teeny tiny baby coffins. You can get them in frog green, fire engine red. Really. The antibodies in yummy mummy only protect the kid for six months, which is why these companies think they can gouge you. They think that you'll spend whatever they ask to keep your kid alive. Want to change things? Prove them wrong. A few hundred parents like you decide they'd rather let their kid die then cough up 40 bucks for a vaccination, believe me, prices will drop *really* fast. Gribbit, gribbit, gribbit, gribbit, gribbit."
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
Kaiser Permanente introduced the vaccines gradually, and have children of the same age with one or the other (or both). This is the source of the 5.6x more likely to get it number.
The older one has more antigens. The older one also had more lawsuits, even though science to this day cannot prove it caused the other problems.
And statistically we'd still be better off with the old one, unproven problems and all, compared to the new one. But there was a telling comment by a scientist -- western societies would no longer "accapt" the old one.
Thank your lawyers. They got rich (Congress even set up a fund for "victims", even though no connection was shown) and people died in increased numbers because of their actions.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
For any parent, guardian, or patient to make an informed decision, we have to have two pieces of information: how well a medicine generally works, and what risks there are to take it. Number One Son does this with several medicines: Colcrys controls the symptoms of his Familial Mediteranian Fever, at the risk of messing with his liver. He takes the flu shot because of the risk to the 1 and a half lung he has left are higher than the risks of the vaccine itself.
A vaccine that doesn't work, or doesn't work well, means that vaccinated patients are accepting the vaccine risk for no significant reward.
I am not anti-vaccine, I am just against unneeded risk. My kids got a round of the Salk vaccine, because the Sabin vaccine might wear out. We also did the chicken pox vaccine, to try to prevent shingles later in life (both families have had extreme shingles outbreaks later in life). OTOH, my daughter will NOT get the cervical cancer vaccine, because HPV is preventable in behavior and the real side-effect rate to the vaccine is a lot higher than the manufacturer is reporting.
My own anecdote is that the reporting on pertussis is off by at least half to two-thirds. Little Miss fought a persistent cough (with antibiotics) for weeks until her allergist said "oh, you have whooping cough. You sound exactly like I did last week." There was no use testing her, because she'd been on antibiotics. Milady and I both caught it from her. The nurse ruined my test by doing it wrong, and Milady's doctor flat-out wouldn't test her (she just got antibiotics, because she was #3 in the house to catch it). The scuttlebutt in the health profession was that the Health Department was desperately trying to keep their numbers down, by hook or by crook.
With my kids' various lung-related issues, they needed a vaccine that actually helps prevent whooping cough. The current one isn't it.
Agreed. If anything antibiotics and vaccines have completely opposite mechanisms of action.
An antibiotic taken as a medication kills bacteria directly, assisting the immune system and making its job easier. In the case of bleaching every surface in your house, it means that the immune system never sees the bacteria in the first place. The same is true of other external use of antibiotics (killing of bacteria before it gets into your body).
A vaccine provokes your immune response against a pathogen without exposing you to the risk of developing the disease (or a greatly reduced risk). Your immune system does all the work, and as a result it is able to do the job entirely on its own much more effectively at a later time.
Comparing the approaches, the disinfectant approach is like bleaching your house 3x/day, and the vaccine approach is like rolling around in the mud and not washing before dinner. I'd be very hesitant to associate the problems of the one with the other.
Please don't confuse vaccines with medication (antibiotics). There is plenty of evidence that antibiotic use leads to resistance. There is plenty of evidence that vaccine overuse leads to less disease, and extinction of the pathogen. Completely different situations. Completely different conditions. Completely different theories. There is nothing they have in common. Don't worry. Common mistake.
$CONSPIRACYTHEORY
Ooh, ooh . . . let me play . . . I'm good at this!
"The government has been working on vaccines that cause autism to use against political enemies by the IRS, which will be running Obamacare, which is why the IRS sorted out the political enemies' tax exemption forms, because those political enemies are against Obamacare, so they won't get the Obamacare autism causing vaccines, which is why the IRS planned to delay processing the tax exemption forms, until the paper borne version of the virus could complete testing in Libya, but the Libyans discovered that the IRS papers distributed to them by the US embassy were the cause of their autistic births, and then stormed the embassy, which was covered up by the government to look like an average Islamic riot, which was working, until the Associated Press found out about it, and was planning to publish, but IRS found out about that, and told then the FBI to tap the phone lines of the Associated Press, so they could find all the journalists and the government leaks, so they could be given a potent adult version of the autistic causing vaccine, and therefore silence them all up, and so this is why the Associated Press reporters are acting all autistic now, and . . . "
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
HPV is preventable in behavior? Pray tell, how? LOL.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
OK, so this vaccine needs a booster every decade or so. Lots of vaccines are like that. The vaccines against tetanus and hepatitis A and B all need to be re-administered every few years. No big deal.
Or maybe people should stop refusing to have their child vaccinated because of $CONSPIRACYTHEORY. Just a thought.
This.
From the article (emphasis mine):
During the 1980s, U.S. parents successfully sued manufacturers, alleging that the whole-cell vaccine also caused long-term brain damage. A 1991 Institute of Medicine report concluded that this was unproven, but by then many pertussis vaccine manufacturers had withdrawn from the market, leading Congress to create a federal vaccine injury compensation program for families who could show a strong case for vaccine damage.
Sound familiar?
One of the first areas in the US hit by a modern pertussis outbreak was here in California. It wasn't among poor people who couldn't afford the vaccine, like you might expect in emergent epidemics. Instead, it was in Marin County, home of highly affluent post-hippy folks like (say) George Lucas. These folks have been reading all of the holistic alternative medicine literature for years and have convinced themselves that every single article is another threat to the precious, precious unborn babies that they plan to have spring from their middle-aged wombs, and so huge numbers of them have decided to stop vaccinating altogether. Shock, horror, when the result is a resurgence of a disease that had been all but unseen in the area for decades, and a couple of those precious babies actually die.
You see the same thing all over the world. In France, there's some kind of conspiracy theory going around that the measles vaccine is bad. Measles is one of the most contagious diseases around. In 2011, there were 118 cases of measles in the entire United States in the first five months; in France, which has only about twice the population of California, there were 17,000.
On the positive side, people, including childless adults, can help to stop the spread of pertussis by getting a booster vaccination, which helps to increase herd immunity. If you catch whooping cough as an adult, you won't die, you'll get a very lousy respiratory illness for a while. But if you don't catch pertussis, you can't spread it to people who are more vulnerable, like children and the elderly. Right now, doctors believe you need a booster about once in your adult life. It's easy to get -- you can get it bundled with your tetanus vaccine, which if you're smart, you're getting every 10 years or so anyway. Last time I got a tetanus shot, I got the pertussis booster with it, and there was no change in price (i.e. both were fully covered by insurance).
Breakfast served all day!
Actually, MSG is indeed present in certain vaccines as a stabilizer. Reports of its toxicity are, of course, bunkum, but it is there.
Everything is better with chainsaws.
From what I see all the denial is coming from one side. Doctors and scientists have never said that vaccines are 100% effective or that they are 100% safe. Like all medication, there are risks and side effects. For the vast majority of people, the side effects are rare and not serious. There is a large database to keep track of side effects and a special vaccine court set up to hear cases of side effects. The court was started to bypass the lengthy trials that normally is associated with a civil suit and is a no-fault system. However in the case of autism, the court (and science) has found no credible link. The initial claim of a link has been discredited due to fraud. Even the study that first suggested a link has been retracted due to this fraud.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
This article talks about how in England there has been a huge increase in the number of measles cases since Wakefield published his claptrap about vaccines causing autism and other nonsense.
For those not bothering to read the article, this is part which you need to know:
This year, the U.K. has had more than 1,200 cases of measles, after a record number of nearly 2,000 cases last year. The country once recorded only several dozen cases every year. It now ranks second in Europe, behind only Romania.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Let me tweak that idea for you a bit. Despite the childish selfishness of many of their ideas, a few of the memes the right wing is shopping are essentially correct.
Their "government shouldn't pick winners" mantra is well supported by the entirety of US history; what the government should be doing in the marketplace is identifying losers. Penalizing bad behavior that would otherwise be rewarded by a free market is one of government's primary functions - for example, murder-for-hire would be incredibly profitable if it weren't for laws that make it much less so. Theft and contract violation are legitimately penalized by government and not by armed vigilante action by businesses that have been harmed. I'll stop there but you can see the list is long!
Carbon taxes and sin taxes were once right-wing ideas - and good ones, too; taxation can be used to redress the externalization of costs by corporations and individuals. We currently punish people for working (income tax) and encourage successful companies to distort both the market and political governance (regulatory competition and so-called business inducements). A wiser course would be to eliminate income tax and outlaw state government "tax break and cash grant competitions" at the federal level, and finance federal government by taxing actors who physically harm the entire citizenry through air, water and ground pollution. If the only way to make something the people want entails high pollution, then the costs will be very high and profit margins slim - until human ingenuity, harnessed by greed if necessary, solves the problem. This is a market approach, but one where the government picks losers, based on quantifiable harm and not pie-in-the-sky techno-dreams of politicians whose sole scientific qualifications are an ability to read opinion polls.
If it's true that anti-vaxxers are harming society as a whole, make them pay for the harm. Tax them extra! Don't un-tax the winners, tax the losers; you can claim it's mathematically the same, but socially and psychologically it's entirely different. Let me pay a "nonvaccination tax" if I have some objection to preventing pandemics, and you'll cut the number of anti-vaxxers down to insignificance in a decade or less.
No. Just no. The 'damage' that vaccines do is barely statistically significant, the benefits they provide are so fundamental that there are core aspects of our culture and society that have changed since their introduction. Your argument that vaccines are going to destroy our immune systems or cause the diseases to mutate shows a lack of understanding to how vaccines works; they train the immune system in the exact same way contracting the virulent disease would. Not only does it not weaken the immune system (in fact it strengthens it) it also prevents a large reservoir of the disease from ever building up in the population. Smaller reservoir means that mutations are less likely simply because the numbers are smaller.
Vaccines have saved more lives than the next 5 medical breakthroughs combined with the possible exception of basic sanitation (if you can call that a medical breakthrough). Trying to argue that "The vaccine debate is a religious one on both sides " is ludicrous, like saying the debate between the theories of relativity and the flying spaghetti monster are on equal ground. They're not, one is backed up by a mountain of evidence so large that people forget that the mountain isn't a natural feature of the world. Before vaccines, parents lived in real fear that their children would catch any one of a half dozen diseases that would maim or kill them, today parents spend hours worrying about a syndrome that has a .05% chance of happening to their newborn.
OTOH, my daughter will NOT get the cervical cancer vaccine, because HPV is preventable in behavior and the real side-effect rate to the vaccine is a lot higher than the manufacturer is reporting.
Hate to say this, but going by teen pregnancy studies parents who make statements like this are the one's who's kids are most at risk.
Also, what sort of creditable study do you have that the risks are higher than what the manufacturer claims? If so, wouldn't the CDC be shutting them down?
I don't read AC A human right
HPV was/is incredibly common, now the particular strain that the vaccine was targeted for was quite rare, but it so happens that the vaccine also provides protection against most of the other strains as well. And yeah... if I can protect future generations from not only the pain and shame of genital warts (90% of which are caused by one of the strains the vaccine protects against) but also cut the rate of cervical cancer while I'm at it (admittedly the actual target of the vaccine) at the cost of... well statistically the vaccine is as safe as a saline injection so I would argue a cost of essentially 0.
Why do you think that HPV is "incredibly rare"?
Population of US : ~251 million [http://www.census.gov/popclock/]
Population of US with HPV : ~79 million [http://www.cdc.gov/std/HPV/STDFact-HPV.htm]
That is ~31% of the population of a country which is aware of the disease and actively fighting it.
Dr. House. Brilliant. Rude. Crazy. Determined. I see the quote marks around it - but you never attributed it. Those of us that are fans can't miss it. But I would imagine there are a whole heck of a lot of people wondering what the heck you are going on about.
Never having sex with anyone who ever had sex with anyone. Simple really.
Vaccines are not used only for the most dangerous diseases. Smallpox? Great vaccine. Chicken pox? The disease is less dangerous than home cooked meals AND has already proven out to be ineffective at providing long term protection.
The bad news: Chicken pox is 10x more dangerous to adults and the prevention of the disease during childhood without protection as an adult will likely lead to higher rates of Chicken pox in adults.
The good news: Chicken pox isn't really dangerous, so the 10x increase in danger will still only be 10x more dangerous than 'not very'.
The current use of the Chicken pox vaccine is totally irresponsible. The vaccine should not be used on people until after puberty. Unfortunately, everybody makes money off of giving it to small children. (except the children who run a higher risk of have to pay for it in adulthood) The money angle isn't a 'conspiracy theory'. The CDC lists a primary reason for giving the Chicken Pox vaccine as a cost savings to the parent by not having to care for their sick child.
Wrong. Here is data straight from the CDC website last updated in 2011. http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vac-gen/additives.htm
They DO put MSG in vaccines, and many other nasties I didn't even mention like Formaldehyde. And mercury is still in there. Mod me as flamebait cause you disagree with hard facts, I don't care I got karma to burn.
in the past 100 years expeted lifespan has jumped 30+ years in the western world.
our quality of life, relatively disease free, was previously unknown. it's still unknown in the parts of the world where they cant get vaccines.
100 years ago being crippled by polio was so common one of our greatest presidents was one such victim.
100 years ago becoming deaf from mumps was common; how many deaf kids do you see today? ya. almost none.
we live longer and better. and vaccines are a huge part of that.
if you want to think differently, i suggest you google smallpox, or visit pakistan or northern india where they still have polio cases.
look at old history photos of what disease wards used to look like, the myriad different diseases and the pain and sufferign caused by them.
or just look at the number of measles (one of hte msot contagious diseases in human history; a person with measles walks through a room, that room remains contagious for 4 hours afterward) cases in our own country. prior to the vaccine in the mid 60's there were >500K cases every year. Within 5 years it dropped to fewer than 100 cases per year. It's been declared effectively eliminated in our country and the rest of the western world.
the people who think vaccines are bad, or overrated, have no clue what they are talking about, and would be shocked to death by the difference between todays world and that of just 100 years, and the amount of disease and suffering that people had to put up with.
TLDR: you're an idiot. vaccines are one of the greatest triumphs of mankind.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
I went to a conference on vaccines several years ago where somebody gave a talk on whooping cough vaccine. He said that there was a problem with the vaccine made from the whole bacterial cell, and it did have a small number of adverse effects, not as bad as whooping cough itself but more common than the other standard vaccines. At that time they were working on a new acellular vaccine, which wouldn't have as many or as serious adverse effects.
Now they have it. That's the tradeoff. Fewer adverse effects but less effectiveness.
None of this is unproven. It's well proven. You can look it up in the textbooks.
If we didn't have so much resistance to vaccines in general, they could have gotten away with a more effective vaccine that had more common adverse effects. It would have been less comfortable but with fewer deaths.
And, unfortunately, this means they become a victim of their own success. People today (and I include myself in this) don't remember when polio or measles or smallpox ran rampant. They don't remember the fear of catching one of these or how serious it is. I've read enough accounts so that I understand intellectually, but I'll never know in a "living it day to day" way. Something for which I'm extremely thankful.
Sadly, some people, in ignorance, assume that these diseases were "basically like colds." You get the measles, stay home for a few days until the bumps disappear and you're good to go. They ignore all of the death or life-long disabilities these diseases brought with them. Next, they buy into the "vaccines are so risky" crowd's talk (vaccines have "toxins" in them. [scary voice]TOOOOOXXXXIIIINNNNNNSSSS!!!!!!{/scary voice]) and mentally increase the risk of the vaccines.
The end result is that these people decide not to vaccinate because they see the vaccines as more dangerous than the diseases when the reality is the exact opposite. In such a big way, mind you, that saying "the exact opposite" still feels like an understatement. And when large groups of these people make these faulty risk assessments, they increase the risk of not only them and their children, but of people who can't be vaccinated for valid reasons (too young, immune system issues, allergies, etc.).
I guarantee you that almost none of these anti-vax folks would be complaining about the MMR if measles was as rampant today as it was before the vaccine was introduced. The ones that would still be complaining would be shouted down by the crowds flocking to get the MMR.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Because this isn't just natural selection. If it just affected kids of those who didn't want to vaccinate, it might be "Natural Selection", but it affects people who CAN'T be vaccinated for valid reasons (allergies, immune system issues, or just plain too young).
For example, Person A decides they won't vaccinate because they think it's all a plot by Big Pharma. Their kids wind up carriers for measles. They cough on their hands and touch a supermarket shopping cart*. An hour later, you put your 4 month old baby in the shopping cart to go into the store. Congratulations! Your baby has been exposed to measles and there's nothing you could have done to stop it. Your baby might now die thanks to Person A - someone who you've never seen in your life.
* In case you say "well, I'd take precautions against shopping cart contamination", this could just as easily be a box on a shelf or something else that you or your baby would touch.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
First of all, studies have been done. LOTS of studies. NONE found ANY link between vaccines and autism. Of course, the "vaccines cause autism" crowd either ignore these studies and continue claiming none have been done or change their explanation about how vaccines cause autism and then declare that no studies have checked on this. The latter approach is moving the goal posts and there is no arguing against that. Not that it's a valid argument, but that no matter how often you debunk the argument, they'll change one tiny aspect of it and require you to spend time and money debunking it all over again.
Also, as the parent of an autistic son, I feel personally qualified to say the following (partially quoting Penn and Teller): Even if vaccines caused autism - WHICH THEY DON'T - but even if they did, it would be FAR better to get your child vaccinated and risk autism than avoid autism and face the diseases that vaccines prevent. An autistic child is still a LIVE child. If your child encounters Whooping Cough or Measles, they stand a good chance of DYING. Too many children are dead because Whooping Cough, Measles, and other vaccine-preventable diseases are making comebacks. Vaccines keep kids alive. I'm thankful that vaccines help keep my autistic son alive and I'll argue with anyone who claims that he's "ruined" because he's autistic and that he's better off having died.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
It's possible, in theory, with some vaccines. But the original pertussis vaccine was a killed bacteria vaccine, which means that the entire organism was present. For it to mutate to survive the immunity it would have to turn into something completely different, so resistance is not a factor in this case.
Some new vaccines may use a limited number of antigens instead of whole organism. If they use few enough, the organism could conceivably mutate to not express that antigen anymore. But even newer vaccines that are in wide circulation include many antigens, so that's still not likely.
OTOH, my daughter will NOT get the cervical cancer vaccine, because HPV is preventable in behavior
On the plus side for her, even if she contracts the virus the most likely outcome is that she will eventually clear it, as most infected individuals do. The risk for cervical cancer arises from the collision of a rather rare outcome with a extremely common exposure; nearly all sexually active adults will unknowingly carry HPV at some time in their lives. Unfortunately, the combination results in some 12,000 cases of cervical cancer per year, in the US.
The original research that identified the HPV-Cancer link actually had to study Nuns to find a sufficiently isolated population; the virus is actually rather common even in monogamous women. Men are not routinely screened for HPV status, and contrary to common belief infections does not necessarily result in genital warts -- for instance, high-risk strain HPV 16 is exceptionally good at producing invisible infections (which may be why it ranks among the more common of HPV strains, actually). These infections may persist undetected for anywhere from months to years, and while your daughter may remain virgin until her wedding night, the same might not be true for her husband (and oral sex counts as far as the virus is concerned, being related to risk of head-and-neck cancers).
An interesting bit of trivia: genetic material from high-risk strains of HPV can be found in some 15-25% of lung cancers tissue samples. We don't have sufficient evidence to make a claim for a causal relationship at this time, but it's a very interesting coincidence. Also interesting is that high-risk strains of HPV have also been found in the CNS of infants with certain forms of intractable epilepsy (Focal Cortical Dysplasia Type II-B). The more we look, the more places we are finding this virus.
The trick is that "innocents" can get caught in the blast. One of the reasons that we strive for herd immunity is because the vaccines aren't 100% effective.
It is sad that your sister died of the disease, but it is still less dangerous than a home cooked meal. Someone's sister has also died of drinking too much water. That doesn't mean that drinking water is a serous threat. Your sister was a tragic edge case. Chicken pox IS something to be taken lightly. That doesn't make your loss less tragic, but it also doesn't make it a serous threat to the general population either.