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Measles Outbreak Tied To Texas Megachurch
New submitter the eric conspiracy sends this quote from NBC:
"An outbreak of measles tied to a Texas megachurch where ministers have questioned vaccination has sickened at least 21 people, including a 4-month-old infant — and it's expected to spread further, state and federal health officials said. 'There's likely a lot more susceptible people,' said Dr. Jane Seward, the deputy director for the viral diseases division at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. ... All of the cases are linked to the Eagle Mountain International Church in Newark, Texas, where a visitor who'd traveled to Indonesia became infected with measles – and then returned to the U.S., spreading it to the largely unvaccinated church community, said Russell Jones, the Texas state epidemiologist. ... Terri Pearsons, a senior pastor of Eagle Mountain International said she has had concerns about possible ties between early childhood vaccines and autism. In the wake of the measles outbreak, however, Pearsons has urged followers to get vaccinated and the church has held several vaccination clinics. ... 'In this community, these cases so far are all in people who refused vaccination for themselves and their children,' [Steward] added. The disease that once killed 500 people a year in the U.S. and hospitalized 48,000 had been considered virtually eradicated after a vaccine introduced in 1963. Cases now show up typically when an unvaccinated person contracts the disease abroad and spreads it upon return to the U.S."
Yeah. Too bad that idiots can spread diseases before they die of their stupidity (Yeah, they're not going to die, but it applies generally).
Herd immunity doesn't work if a bunch of idiots decides that vaccines are evil/dangerous/demonstrative of a lack of faith/useless/*insert absurd argument here*.
Let's also thank the media, for creating hysteria where there should be none, and not having the guts to admit they were just spreading FUD after it becomes obvious that their latest sensationalist bullshit is just that.
It's also nice how a "senior pastor" quickly becomes a medical authority for these people. Do they have their doctors fix their plumbing as well?
I assume you are trying to imply that the measles outbreak came from Mexico. Too bad you are full of shit. One of the members of the church visited Indonesia and brought it back.
You are entitled to your own opinions, not your own facts.
Each Biblical plague was an affront to an Egyptian deity, more or less.
then they're putting everyone at risk for mumps and rubella, both with reproductive implications.
I don't think these people are doubting that vaccines work. Rather they are more afraid of their kids having autism than measles. And they don't understand that vaccines don't cause autism.
I think many have this false belief due to (at least) one now widely discredited study published proposing this link - this/these ideas are still pushed by some people and celebrities, like Jenny McCarthy.
From Anti-Vaccine Body Count:
The United States Anti-Vaccination Movement is composed of a variety of individuals ranging from former doctors who should know better, to semi-celebrities who have no medical training, to anti-government conspiracy theorists who distrust anything that the government says.
Unfortunately, some people would rather believe that some *thing* - the vaccination - caused their child to "get" Autism rather than living with the understanding that it was genetic - and came from them.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
The autism caused by vax was reported by a doctor doing research.
No, it was reported by a doctor perpetrating a fraud. "Doctor" Wakefield's paper was subsequently retracted by The Lancet and he was thrown out of medicine permanently.
Phil Jones has admitted to falsifying data
Sorry, no. He did no such thing. What you just said is the Fox "News" version of the story, in which the truth is far more complicated than you make it. There wasn't any kind of fraud going on, and to talk about this in the same manner as if Jones is equal to Wakefield is pure, unadulterated, bullshit.
There was an investigation spurred by a *republican* and the result was that Jones was vindicated. Which was a fact that you conveniently left out of your "just so" story.
I just can't figure that part out.
Because you are a moron. Full stop.
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BMO
Oh dear.
That's not how vaccinations work. They don't, and never claim to, offer 100% life-long immunity to recipients.
What they DO offer, is herd immunity - many recipients will become immune for a decent period of time. Therefore a community of vaccinated people will have a much higher proportion of immune people so the virus will have an exponentially lower chance of successfully spreading. Introduce someone from outside the immunized community who has become incubus plague and you've introduced a new chain of infection for those with whom the person directly interacts.
This is basic epidemiology.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
They're only putting those who are not vaccinated at risk.
1) Vaccination is not 100% effective in all subjects. It works almost always, but sometimes doesn't stick.
2) Some people are allergic to some vaccines so can't be vaccinated and have to rely on herd immunity to not come in contact with the disease.
3) Some people, eg. those being treated for cancer, have damaged immune systems and can't tolerate the vaccine; even if they were given it, it would not work due to their immune system being broken.
4) Infants can't be vaccinated immediately at birth; allowing diseases to become common may not affect vaccinated adults much but will still increase infant mortality.
5) More hosts around immune people means the disease has the chance to throw itself at the vaccine over and over until adapted strains that aren't prevented by the vaccine proliferate.
It can take eight days to two weeks after exposure to measles before an infected person develops symptoms. I know lineups are long, but they're not THAT long.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Yeah, I must be missing something here. Are those who do not get vaccinated putting those of us who are at serious risk?
Yes. The measles herd immunity threshold for the MMR vaccine is 92-94%. If more than 6% of the idiots around you go unvaccinated, measles becomes likely to spread among people who have already taken the vaccine or otherwise acquired immunity.
The reason is simple: the immune system is random. The B cells in each vaccinated individual produce different antibodies in response to the same antigen. Since an antibody's response to antigen X1 doesn't correlate much with its response to antigen X2, and different lines of a disease have different antigens, no vaccine can be 100% effective. Any one person might have total immunity to some given line of the disease (called a "quasispecies"), yet be totally vulnerable to some other quasispecies whose antigens are invisible to the existing antibodies. Different people are vulnerable to different quasispecies, and there are thousands of quasispecies (grouped into 21 strains in the case of measles), so we usually just throw our hands up in the air and pretend that infection vulnerability is a wholly non-deterministic thing.
Herd immunity is the threshold where each infection produces, on average, one new infection. If the vaccination rate is above herd immunity, each infection produces less than one new infection (exponential decay). The outbreak reaches its peak quickly, then vanishes as the existing victims fight off the disease (or die). If the vaccination rate is below herd immunity, then each infection leads to more than one new infection (exponential growth). The outbreak then grows rapidly until so many people are already carrying the disease that the disease runs out of new hosts, reaching a new steady-state of one new infection per infection... at which point we say it has transformed from epidemic (an outbreak) to endemic (never going away on its own).
If vaccines were 100% effective, falling below the herd immunity threshold wouldn't be so worrisome for people who are vaccinated. True, among vaccine-refusing populations (and those who can't benefit from vaccines, e.g. babies, the very elderly, AIDS patients, and organ transplant recipients) the disease would perpetually rage, as there would be enough contact between vulnerable islands that the disease never quite burns out. But in reality (a) each person who is immunized has a small-but-nonzero chance of catching the infection (and passing it on), so everyone is potential virus-habitat regardless of vaccination status, and (b) more victims means larger viral population means more viral reproduction means creation of more quasispecies. More quasispecies means that, if there is some way that the antigens can change that will give the disease access to new victims without compromising the disease's ability to spread, evolution will find and exploit it sooner rather than later, so the virus can get its grubby little capsid proteins on fresh meat that other strains can't touch (i.e. you).
What we're seeing in Texas is an outbreak in an overall US population where vaccination rates are falling, but still above the herd immunity threshold... for now. If rates continue to fall, we can expect these outbreaks to become larger and more frequent, until they eventually reach criticality and the end of one outbreak always overlaps the beginning of the next, i.e. the disease becomes endemic again.
(Pertussis is also stupid contagious and thus has a high threshold for herd immunity, but pertussis is about 10 times more likely to kill a baby than measles is. Like measles, pertussis is also seeing big ugly outbreaks these days: the Denver metro area, Northern California around Marin, Washington state, i.e. basically the places where the cultish and vaccine-refusing Waldorf School has a notable presence
Range Voting: preference intensity matters
This is part of my complaint against the chicken pox vaccine. Home cooked meals are over 3x more dangerous than Chicken Pox in a nation that does not vaccinate against it. If the number in the summary is correct, Measles is only about 1 1/2 times as dangerous as home cooked meals. The press these diseases get when someone catches them just feeds into the suspicion that some people have of vaccinations.
While my child got most of his vaccines, I specifically opted out of the chicken pox vaccine. The reason is that when the numbers are hashed out, there is more danger from chicken pox if everyone gets the vaccine than if no one does. This is because of exactly what arth1 said. People don't get it as children when it is a mild disease that has a death rate similar to riding a bus to school or high school football. Instead, the vaccine which is well known to not offer life long immunity, protects the person just long enough for them to fall into a group that has 10x the risk from the disease.
What we consistently hear though is that "Chicken Pox is deadly." People advocate forcing the use of the vaccine, or taking children away from parents that this poor quality vaccine. Images of Polio are called out as arguments to vaccinate against chickenpox.
OK, you know it's measles we're talking about?
Yes. It's the same disease that killed almost a fifth of Hawaii's population because they'd never encountered it before and had no immunity. It can be really, really nasty in cases like that and I'm almost surprised that more haven't died yet in this outbreak.
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