The fact of the matter is that the incidence of those terrible contagious diseases was already drastically decreasing before vaccinations were introduced, caused by better hygienic, nutritional and medical conditions. After (sometimes even forced) introduction of vaccination in some cities, the practice was soon abandoned as it became clear that vaccination only led to more deaths. Yes, I'm not kidding.
Your last part is spot on. A randomly placebo controlled double blind trial to prove the efficacy and safety of vaccines has never been carried out, so there isn't even proof that that assumption is correct.
The astronaut could have had a nice job, paid by the roman catholic church at the time of Galileo, the biologist might even currently find a well-paid job at a extreme christian university and the surgeon had a good job in the time of Dr. Semmelweiss, killing 50% of the women delivering a baby in his clinic, while Semmelweiss had already proven that simply washing your hands could have saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of care seeking women.
This actually means there is a time for everything, and not at the least for humility in the medical establishment with respect to dissenting views.
Your assumption that they practice 'conscious misrepresentation' is a big mistake. Of course they don't wilfully misrepresent something they actually know better.
They have the honest personal opinion, and maybe even based on professional experience--did anyone even bother to ask them?--that there are dangers associated with vaccinations. And science and V.A.R.S. suggest there might be some truth in that opinion.
And it's quite possible that non-vaccination may lead to a preventable death, but on the other hand, vaccination also may lead to preventable damage to life.
It's about this balance in public health, not about the bottom line of the pharmaceutical industry.
A person in working in medicine has a professional obligation to "do no harm".
Where did you miss the part in the article where it said that they were expressing this personal opinion on social media, not practising it in the clinics where they work?
And now that you mention the term 'evidence-based', where did you find the 'evidence' that vaccines are both effective and 100% safe?
And they are not 'promoting woo', they are stating their own personal honest opinion. The idea that these people suddenly turned from highly professional caring nurses into some evil stupid nutjobs deliberately trying to wipe out humanity by promoting a total non-vaccination policy is maybe even the biggest bullshit that goes around in this discussion.
Well, he has the right to any opinion, including the one you mentioned, so that part of your question can be answered with 'yes'.
Within a certain, limited context, he even could be right.
But if he'd generalize that concept to his whole work he'd soon find his patients dying by the hundreds and his license, and rightly so, being revoked and himself possibly ending up in prison, or living under some bridge in Melbourne, if constabulary would allow that.
However, application of this admission to the vaccine opinion discussion would constitute a false equivalence fallacy, so I have no idea in which direction you were heading with that remark.
I see. So apparently you don't share the opinion that people should have the right to speak freely about their opinions. Way to go!
But to come back to your question: as a concerned person I have read quite a lot about vaccinations and have never encountered any study that was carried out in a way in agreement with to the golden standard of evidence based medicine: randomly placebo controlled double blind trial of sufficient epidemiological size.
Now you on the other hand, with your reference to accredited authorities seem to be an expert who surely can point me to even only one such studies, no?
Vaccination is a matter of public health, and the decision whether or not to vaccinate, and in what amount and frequency, is a question of balance between people killed if not vaccinated, and people damaged from vaccination.
I think parents have the right to be informed about both sides of this balance and to be able to decide for themselves whether they want to risk the health of their kids while trying to protect them for something that might not even ever happen.
Trying to kill off this discussion really isn't helpful, will kill the little trust people still have in a supposedly not yet corrupt medical establishment, will not silence the questions and in fact is quite counter-productive.
Hey, is this a deja-vu, or did I really see this exact statement in a posting (long) before? Was that you?
Anyway, the funny thing is that the requirements regarding vaccine testing are not nearly as strict as for 'medicines'. Both fall in totally different categories.
Further, it is the vaccine manufacturer that carries out the safety tests. Not some strictly independent government agency. And the fact that, in the US, the pharmaceutical companies are not liable for any damaging side-effects is also desincentivising their search for the same.
We all know that for instance Monsanto 'studied' the effects of Round-Up on rats just short enough to not find the increased occurrence of cancer that Seralini found.
So much for 'industry commitment'.
It's only because of your condition that I'm taking the effort to reply to your abusively worded post.
You are just one individual case while we're talking statistics here.
And even the fact that your child is classified as autistic does not prove that this is a result of your genes and not from his (probable) MMR shot at young age.
Heck, even the CDC found to their dismay that MMR led to a 3-fold increase of autism in African American children compared to Caucasian Americans.
Do you really expect me to put any effort into answering some anonymous coward that addresses me like that?
Try to learn some manners and then come back here.
Venting one's doubts about the safety of pumping 46 vaccine cocktails into the body of child before he reaches 2 years isn't 'dangerous practice'.
The safety and efficacy of administering and combining so many vaccines and their adjuvants has never been studied, let alone been proven.
Or at least no reports regarding such research has been liberated yet by the pharmaceutical companies.
The medical establishment isn't without errors, (support for cigarette industry--smoking is 'healthy', Dr. Semmelweiss, etc.) so a bit of humility would be a much better attitude instead of this heavy handed approach against vulnerable people who see the effects of the current vaccination practice in their professional lives and are trying to raise a red flag as a warning.
It all depends on whether the projectile is still there, what it did hit and etc.
You'd be surprised what a good dose of vitamin C could do.:)
Further, you do have the right to a second (and third, fourth, etc.) opinion.
You have to go back to the original article that stated that those nurses gave their personal opinion on social media, not their office.
Further they better would inform their clients of possible negative side effects, including autism, because that's what they are supposed to do: provide for informed consent.
Not all vaccines are safe and the vaccine compensation court in the USA has already awarded billions of $ to vaccine victims, including autistic ones.
Funny enough you are just proving my point. Apparently you defend a clique putting out the claims that all the autism cases are 'just' genetic defects of the parents, who subsequently try to scam the vaccine compensations courts out of their billions of dollars.
Because after all, that's what the vaccine compensation court in the USA already has payed out to vaccine victims: billions of dollars.
The accusations you mention are what the GMC put forth as arguments to bar Dr. Andrew Wakefield and Prof. John Walker-Smith (his co-author in the bowel disease study) from medical practice.
Prof. John Walker-Smith fortunately did have the funds (i.e.: legal insurance) to fight this in court, which he did, and the judge, Justice John Mitting, ruled that its (the GMC's) conclusions were based on "inadequate and superficial reasoning and, in a number of instances, a wrong conclusion." The verdict restored Walker-Smith’s name to the medical register and his reputation to the medical community. This conclusion is not surprising, as the GMC trial had no actual complainants, no harm came to the children who were studied, and parents supported Walker-Smith and Wakefield through the trial, reporting that their children had medically benefited from the treatment they received at the Royal Free Hospital.
So I call total bullshit on your allegations.
There is nothing wrong with the cautionary principle that made Dr. Andrew Wakefield advice to separate the measles vaccination from the MMR jab and give it a few months later, and the treatment he consequently got falls for me in the category of bullying and revenge by the pharmaceutical industry with government officials criminally colluding.
Actually, the Japanese, who had followed this discussion, decided to postpone the measles vaccination, after which the autism rate in young children suddenly and spectacularly dropped.
I doubt they'd do anything to someone expressing an "opinion" on the matter, so long as they made it clear to the patient that their opinion was factually incorrect.
Utter non-sense. Nobody is going to state his/her opinion while 'making clear' that that opinion is factual incorrect without entering in a state of severe cognitive dissonance.
The maximum one can do is to state an opinion, accompanied with the remark that it is merely an opinion and not necessarily the absolute and simple truth.
And I think medical professionals do have that right on social media.
In the office, the medical professional has to aim at informed consent, meaning that the client needs to be told about all positive and possible negative effects of the procedure.
If I go to a pediatrician with my child for an inoculation against the quite innocent measles and am confronted with the possibility of my child becoming autistic while trying to 'protect' it against measles, then I would really start to worry and probably would not agree with that vaccin.
If the medical professional would then continue telling me that the risk of autism would go down to almost zero if we'd only inoculate against mumps and rubella, and wait 6 more months with the measles vaccination, then I probably would choose for that option.
I'm not accepting your opinion that what 'anti-vax crackpots' are 'peddling' is mere nonsens, as there are quite some signals that vaccinations are not inherently safe and that some of them can have some quite nasty side effects.
After all, who wants to expose their child to the risk of getting a severe disease by protecting it against a much milder one?
In the past, long before the vaccinations were started, hygienic, medical and nutritional conditions were improving and the incidence of the diseases you are talking about was already in a long decline. Maybe that's why they are not dying of the disease 'that we now vaccinate against'? There is zero proof that the further decline can be contributed to vaccinations instead of a further improvement in social, hygienic, medical, environmental and nutritional conditions. Zero.
I also have no idea what you mean by a guy who was (and still is) trying to promote his own vaccination method.
It could be that you are hinting at Dr. Andrew Wakefield who publicly suggested separating the measles vaccination from the MMR vaccin and giving it 6 months later in order to decrease the amount of autism cases.
I'm also totally at a loss why that would be such a bad advice.
And where, by the way, is the randomly controlled double blind trial in an epidemiologically relevant part of society that shows both the efficacy and the safety of the MMR vaccin?
After carefully profiling your character I decided to come up with a link out of a New York Times article that you might accept as genuine:
Like many vaccines, Prevnar requires multiple jabs. Each shot is priced at $136, and most states require children to get four doses before entering day care or preschool. Pfizer, the sole manufacturer, had revenues of nearly $4 billion from its Prevnar vaccine line last year...
Further I think that there must be something wrong with your be-ing rather than with my e key, which was a mere typo.
There is no provenly safe jab. And therefore parents should have the right to decide, and also healthcare professionals should have the right to vent their opinions.
Slashdot Mirror
I've never seen anybody stating that autism is exclusively caused by vaccines, so your sarcasm isn't necessary.
Well, in every camp you can find reasonable debaters and idiots (yes, that includes you :).
The fact of the matter is that the incidence of those terrible contagious diseases was already drastically decreasing before vaccinations were introduced, caused by better hygienic, nutritional and medical conditions. After (sometimes even forced) introduction of vaccination in some cities, the practice was soon abandoned as it became clear that vaccination only led to more deaths. Yes, I'm not kidding.
Your last part is spot on. A randomly placebo controlled double blind trial to prove the efficacy and safety of vaccines has never been carried out, so there isn't even proof that that assumption is correct.
The astronaut could have had a nice job, paid by the roman catholic church at the time of Galileo, the biologist might even currently find a well-paid job at a extreme christian university and the surgeon had a good job in the time of Dr. Semmelweiss, killing 50% of the women delivering a baby in his clinic, while Semmelweiss had already proven that simply washing your hands could have saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of care seeking women.
This actually means there is a time for everything, and not at the least for humility in the medical establishment with respect to dissenting views.
Your assumption that they practice 'conscious misrepresentation' is a big mistake. Of course they don't wilfully misrepresent something they actually know better.
They have the honest personal opinion, and maybe even based on professional experience--did anyone even bother to ask them?--that there are dangers associated with vaccinations. And science and V.A.R.S. suggest there might be some truth in that opinion.
And it's quite possible that non-vaccination may lead to a preventable death, but on the other hand, vaccination also may lead to preventable damage to life.
It's about this balance in public health, not about the bottom line of the pharmaceutical industry.
A person in working in medicine has a professional obligation to "do no harm".
Where did you miss the part in the article where it said that they were expressing this personal opinion on social media, not practising it in the clinics where they work?
And now that you mention the term 'evidence-based', where did you find the 'evidence' that vaccines are both effective and 100% safe?
And they are not 'promoting woo', they are stating their own personal honest opinion. The idea that these people suddenly turned from highly professional caring nurses into some evil stupid nutjobs deliberately trying to wipe out humanity by promoting a total non-vaccination policy is maybe even the biggest bullshit that goes around in this discussion.
Well, he has the right to any opinion, including the one you mentioned, so that part of your question can be answered with 'yes'.
Within a certain, limited context, he even could be right.
But if he'd generalize that concept to his whole work he'd soon find his patients dying by the hundreds and his license, and rightly so, being revoked and himself possibly ending up in prison, or living under some bridge in Melbourne, if constabulary would allow that.
However, application of this admission to the vaccine opinion discussion would constitute a false equivalence fallacy, so I have no idea in which direction you were heading with that remark.
I see. So apparently you don't share the opinion that people should have the right to speak freely about their opinions. Way to go!
But to come back to your question: as a concerned person I have read quite a lot about vaccinations and have never encountered any study that was carried out in a way in agreement with to the golden standard of evidence based medicine: randomly placebo controlled double blind trial of sufficient epidemiological size.
Now you on the other hand, with your reference to accredited authorities seem to be an expert who surely can point me to even only one such studies, no?
Vaccination is a matter of public health, and the decision whether or not to vaccinate, and in what amount and frequency, is a question of balance between people killed if not vaccinated, and people damaged from vaccination.
I think parents have the right to be informed about both sides of this balance and to be able to decide for themselves whether they want to risk the health of their kids while trying to protect them for something that might not even ever happen.
Trying to kill off this discussion really isn't helpful, will kill the little trust people still have in a supposedly not yet corrupt medical establishment, will not silence the questions and in fact is quite counter-productive.
I think you're just sick. Even if you were a payed shill, you'd still be totally sick in your head.
Hey, is this a deja-vu, or did I really see this exact statement in a posting (long) before? Was that you?
Anyway, the funny thing is that the requirements regarding vaccine testing are not nearly as strict as for 'medicines'. Both fall in totally different categories.
Further, it is the vaccine manufacturer that carries out the safety tests. Not some strictly independent government agency. And the fact that, in the US, the pharmaceutical companies are not liable for any damaging side-effects is also desincentivising their search for the same.
We all know that for instance Monsanto 'studied' the effects of Round-Up on rats just short enough to not find the increased occurrence of cancer that Seralini found.
So much for 'industry commitment'.
Interesting contribution.
The genetic predisposition could as well be a different sensitivity to vaccines and adjuvants.
It's only because of your condition that I'm taking the effort to reply to your abusively worded post.
You are just one individual case while we're talking statistics here.
And even the fact that your child is classified as autistic does not prove that this is a result of your genes and not from his (probable) MMR shot at young age.
Heck, even the CDC found to their dismay that MMR led to a 3-fold increase of autism in African American children compared to Caucasian Americans.
Do you really expect me to put any effort into answering some anonymous coward that addresses me like that?
Try to learn some manners and then come back here.
Venting one's doubts about the safety of pumping 46 vaccine cocktails into the body of child before he reaches 2 years isn't 'dangerous practice'.
The safety and efficacy of administering and combining so many vaccines and their adjuvants has never been studied, let alone been proven.
Or at least no reports regarding such research has been liberated yet by the pharmaceutical companies.
The medical establishment isn't without errors, (support for cigarette industry--smoking is 'healthy', Dr. Semmelweiss, etc.) so a bit of humility would be a much better attitude instead of this heavy handed approach against vulnerable people who see the effects of the current vaccination practice in their professional lives and are trying to raise a red flag as a warning.
It's not whether his opinion is dangerous, it's whether we allow to have people prosecuted for stating their personal opinion.
I'm against.
Let's stick to autism.
Do you have any numbers that suggest a 2.5% of the parents is even 'mildly' autistic?
It all depends on whether the projectile is still there, what it did hit and etc. :)
You'd be surprised what a good dose of vitamin C could do.
Further, you do have the right to a second (and third, fourth, etc.) opinion.
You have to go back to the original article that stated that those nurses gave their personal opinion on social media, not their office.
Further they better would inform their clients of possible negative side effects, including autism, because that's what they are supposed to do: provide for informed consent.
Not all vaccines are safe and the vaccine compensation court in the USA has already awarded billions of $ to vaccine victims, including autistic ones.
Funny enough you are just proving my point. Apparently you defend a clique putting out the claims that all the autism cases are 'just' genetic defects of the parents, who subsequently try to scam the vaccine compensations courts out of their billions of dollars.
Because after all, that's what the vaccine compensation court in the USA already has payed out to vaccine victims: billions of dollars.
With dismissal. is that all?
You call 4% (USA) a 'small percentage'?
The accusations you mention are what the GMC put forth as arguments to bar Dr. Andrew Wakefield and Prof. John Walker-Smith (his co-author in the bowel disease study) from medical practice.
Prof. John Walker-Smith fortunately did have the funds (i.e.: legal insurance) to fight this in court, which he did, and the judge, Justice John Mitting, ruled that its (the GMC's) conclusions were based on "inadequate and superficial reasoning and, in a number of instances, a wrong conclusion." The verdict restored Walker-Smith’s name to the medical register and his reputation to the medical community. This conclusion is not surprising, as the GMC trial had no actual complainants, no harm came to the children who were studied, and parents supported Walker-Smith and Wakefield through the trial, reporting that their children had medically benefited from the treatment they received at the Royal Free Hospital.
So I call total bullshit on your allegations.
There is nothing wrong with the cautionary principle that made Dr. Andrew Wakefield advice to separate the measles vaccination from the MMR jab and give it a few months later, and the treatment he consequently got falls for me in the category of bullying and revenge by the pharmaceutical industry with government officials criminally colluding.
Actually, the Japanese, who had followed this discussion, decided to postpone the measles vaccination, after which the autism rate in young children suddenly and spectacularly dropped.
I doubt they'd do anything to someone expressing an "opinion" on the matter, so long as they made it clear to the patient that their opinion was factually incorrect.
Utter non-sense. Nobody is going to state his/her opinion while 'making clear' that that opinion is factual incorrect without entering in a state of severe cognitive dissonance.
The maximum one can do is to state an opinion, accompanied with the remark that it is merely an opinion and not necessarily the absolute and simple truth.
And I think medical professionals do have that right on social media.
In the office, the medical professional has to aim at informed consent, meaning that the client needs to be told about all positive and possible negative effects of the procedure.
If I go to a pediatrician with my child for an inoculation against the quite innocent measles and am confronted with the possibility of my child becoming autistic while trying to 'protect' it against measles, then I would really start to worry and probably would not agree with that vaccin.
If the medical professional would then continue telling me that the risk of autism would go down to almost zero if we'd only inoculate against mumps and rubella, and wait 6 more months with the measles vaccination, then I probably would choose for that option.
I'm not accepting your opinion that what 'anti-vax crackpots' are 'peddling' is mere nonsens, as there are quite some signals that vaccinations are not inherently safe and that some of them can have some quite nasty side effects.
After all, who wants to expose their child to the risk of getting a severe disease by protecting it against a much milder one?
I also have no idea what you mean by a guy who was (and still is) trying to promote his own vaccination method.
It could be that you are hinting at Dr. Andrew Wakefield who publicly suggested separating the measles vaccination from the MMR vaccin and giving it 6 months later in order to decrease the amount of autism cases.
I'm also totally at a loss why that would be such a bad advice.
And where, by the way, is the randomly controlled double blind trial in an epidemiologically relevant part of society that shows both the efficacy and the safety of the MMR vaccin?
After carefully profiling your character I decided to come up with a link out of a New York Times article that you might accept as genuine:
Like many vaccines, Prevnar requires multiple jabs. Each shot is priced at $136, and most states require children to get four doses before entering day care or preschool. Pfizer, the sole manufacturer, had revenues of nearly $4 billion from its Prevnar vaccine line last year...
Further I think that there must be something wrong with your be-ing rather than with my e key, which was a mere typo.
There is no provenly safe jab. And therefore parents should have the right to decide, and also healthcare professionals should have the right to vent their opinions.