Honestly, the level of discourse in this country is an absolute joke. It doesn't matter what side you are on.
I know that vaccines are critical and that there is nothing wrong with them. But to not even admit the possibility that there might be a link between vaccines and some health problems is, to me, very anti-science.
My understanding for science has always been to question all assumptions, even ones you think are your sacred cows.
The problem is that you're agreeing that there is no link but then trying to argue that maybe there really is a link and everyone should think really hard about it. This is not a logical or factual argument but you expect that people should act as if it is. If you have facts or even logical arguments to put forth, then do so. But don't claim that everyone is being anti-science when they dismiss your baseless speculation as baseless speculation.
The mechanism are known, I've studied it in basic biology classes, and all doctors have studied it in detail - you can too.
The process by which our body deals with a vaccine is based on the same processes it uses to deal with any invader (and then building a repository of responses to handle such cases in future).
If you don't have the time to look into it yourself, you can consider what every other doctor and medical researcher in the world has studied and supported.
Otherwise this is a kind of unscientific "keeping an open mind" mantra. The point of an open mind is to not just be a weather vane With no fixed position.
It is to keep an open mind in order to study the facts and draw an inference based on it.
That's science. Keeping an open mind for the sake of an open mind is philosophy at best.
Furthermore, you can consider the fact that anti vaccers are not making the limited case you are. The response of people to anti vaccine, is not based on your claims of possible possibilities, but to anti vaccer claims and statements
Here is an interesting example. In the 60s a vaccine against chlamydia was developed and then tested in one of "developing" countries. Vaccinated people showed high titers of antibodies in their blood (this is, by the way, how efficacy of vaccines is judged, not by the actual clinical studies, read the inserts, you'd be surprised). Despite the high titers vaccinated people were much more likely to get the disease and the course of the disease was more severe. The vaccine was pulled, and the reason for the failure was not known at the time.
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smartnews-science/why-1960s-ch...
If you follow the links in that article you will see how the process of how the body deals with a vaccine is not necessarily the same as the process of dealing with the disease directly.
Human immune system is complicated and is not fully understood. Infant immune system differs from the one of the adults, which further complicates the matters. Saying that the science there is settled is just not true.
Nobody is arguing that the basic functionality of vaccines doesn't work - this is a strawman argument that those who wish to dismiss any criticism of the vaccine industry use.
Understanding infectious diseases and taking proper personal hygiene measures along with having clean drinking water and plumbing/sewage had much more to do with the decline in infectious diseases than vaccines ever did. The effectiveness of vaccines is highly overstated.
Many doctors have spoken out about the vaccine issue. They are typically threatened and punished after doing so.
Pharma companies have billions if not trillions of dollars in profits at stake on this issue. To dismiss any concern as being "anti science" is the height of ignorance. Any academic institution is simply a collection of fallible human beings. These institutions can, and have, become corrupted just as easily as any other.
There is a very long list of vaccines that have been developed that were later found to have been causing horrible medical problems. The idea that a vaccine could cause medical problems is not at all a controversial one.
There is convincing evidence from scientists like a certain CDC whistleblower that there is indeed data showing that there are major problems with the current vaccine schedule.
Asking questions like, why has the vaccine schedule for babies exploded to dozens of shots in rapid succession, when there's not been an equivalent explosion in those infectious diseases? Why should gigantic pharma companies, who every year make billions in profits, be not held liable for any harm that is caused, nor are they required to perform rigorous testing with double blind human trials for vaccines (like they are for other drugs)?
But I guess since you once studied it in a basic biology class, all those questions are just "dumb anti vaxers".
Clean water keeps you from getting bacterial dysentery. It doesn't do much to stop you from getting polio. Vaccination and herd immunity are what keep you from getting polio, and smallpox, and measles, and a couple dozen other diseases that used to regularly kill people. The effectiveness of vaccines is not overstated. It's clearly established and it's only because we're fortunate enough to have lived with widespread vaccinations for decades that we've lost sight of the impact they have.
> ...There is convincing evidence from scientists like a certain CDC whistleblower that there is indeed data showing that there are major problems with the current vaccine schedule...
You made a whole bunch of scary claims with zero evidence. This is not science. This is fear mongering.
> Asking questions like, why has the vaccine schedule for babies exploded to dozens of shots in rapid succession, when there's not been an equivalent explosion in those infectious diseases?
The reduction in infectious disease somehow indicates that vaccines are low-value to you? The widespread availability and use of vaccination is a huge part of why those infectious diseases aren't common now. How many people do you know who've died of smallpox or polio or tetanus?
Also babies don't get "dozens of shots in rapid succession". This is a fear-mongering lie. In the US, before 12 months a child should get a minimum of 14 vaccinations and a maximum of about 22 depending on if some vaccination are taken early, 3-shot vaccine series are chosen over 2-shot vaccine series, and whether the child is considered high risk for certain diseases. Less than two dozen spread across a full year and typically barely more than a dozen.
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/schedules/hcp/imz/child-adolesc...
> Why should gigantic pharma companies, who every year make billions in profits, be not held liable for any harm that is caused
Essentially no one holds this position. You're making up strawmen.
> nor are they required to perform rigorous testing with double blind human trials for vaccines (like they are for other drugs
Citation? What vaccines are we giving our children that are not rigorously tested?
As for the effectiveness, it is absolutely must be questioned, and here is a case in point: http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/lawrence-solomon/merck-whistleb...
Fair enough, but "In the U.S, following a mass immunization campaign promoted by the March of Dimes, the annual number of polio cases fell from 35,000 in 1953 to 5,600 by 1957. By 1961 only 161 cases were recorded in the United States."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polio_vaccine#Jonas_Salk
This isn't a result of a major hygiene change. So far as I know, hygiene in the US did not drastically change in this time period, while polio cases dropped by orders of magnitude. This is the result of consistent and systematic vaccination.
> As for the effectiveness, it is absolutely must be questioned, and here is a case in point
This is very interesting and very relevant to whether specific vaccines are effective. It does not in any way dispute that in general vaccines can be extremely effective.
For the record, I'm totally in favor anyone putting forth evidence that certain vaccines are ineffective, or dangerous, or even cause autism. So long as there's actual evidence to discuss and debate.
Here is a recent case that could have been labeled polio just a few decades ago: http://abc7chicago.com/health/6-year-old-boys-death-linked-t...
I cannot find stats right now but I saw numbers of AFM in India where true polio cases keep going down YoY but the overall numbers of AFM have recently skyrocketed.
Also let's keep things in perspective. The absolute number of people getting infected by polio or other enteroviruses do not actually show any symptoms. It is quite rare for the virus to invade the nervous system which leads to the symptoms we all fear.
Here is a curious link to an article from 1961 with memories still fresh from the polio outbreaks of the middle of the 20th century and shortly after the polio vaccines were introduced.
Note the reserved tone which is so at odds with the current day thinking about the success of the polio vaccine. The whole article is worth a read, I will just provide a quote here that is pertinent to our discussion.
"Evaluating the true effectiveness of the Salk vaccine and the new oral vaccines has been difficult for several reasons. Polio is a relatovely rare disease in the United States. Because so few persons get it in its paralyzing form, success of an immunizing agent is hard to determine. The definition of polio also has changed in the last six or seven years. Several diseases which were often diagnosed as polio are now classified as aseptic meningitis or illnesses caused by one of the Coxsackie or Echo viruses. The number of polio cases in 1961 cannot accurately be compared with those in, say 1952, because the criteria for diagnoses have changed."
http://archives.chicagotribune.com/1961/03/05/page/62/articl...
Perhaps this is a misreading on my part. I was equating AFM with the "worst case" paralytic polio, which is fairly rare at ~1%. It's unclear to me what percentage of polio cases result in muscle weakness (which AFM seems to correspond to more closely) that doesn't qualify as paralytic.
> I just obliquely wanted to address the issue that polio is often brought up as an absolutely devastating and dangerous disease, and yet generally speaking it is not so.
This is the case for almost every disease. Paralysis in ~1% of victims is still pretty terrible.
> Note the reserved tone which is so at odds with the current day thinking about the success of the polio vaccine. The whole article is worth a read, I will just provide a quote here that is pertinent to our discussion.
It's an interesting article, but doesn't change the fact that polio vaccines have a huge body of supporting evidence. Ignoring the question of 1952 vs 1961 polio counts, what about 1988 to 2016? It's dropped from 350000 cases to 42 in that time. What about all the trials that have shown the effectiveness of polio vaccines? What about the fact that wild polio is eradicated in North America?
No one says vaccines are perfect. No one claims that drug trials are perfect either. But the overall evidence still seems overwhelming, and nitpicking how polio used to be categorized and pointing to some upswings due to the cyclic nature of infectious diseases is not evidence against the efficacy of vaccines.
This is my problem with anti-vaccine lobbying. There's a distinct lack of evidence in their favor, so they resort mostly to nitpicking minor concerns while ignoring the bigger picture. Meanwhile they'll happily jump on weak and even fraudulent studies that support their claims and ignore their deficiencies.
"Hey, Polio is eradicated in the US and reduced by almost 4 orders of magnitude worldwide. That looks pretty effective."
"Yeah, but we haven't always counted polio cases exactly the same, and there was a brief upswing in polio a few years after the vaccine as introduced. Also vaccines cause autism."
"Uh, so we still managed to eradicate polio after the upswing. And the vaccine-autism link was literally fraud."
"But what if you're wrong?"
"??"
There we go, the usual methods to discredit science at play again.
Firstly, no you are absolutely wrong, in that people directly claim that vaccines are a scam and that they kill babies/children.
Next, you are doing the usual spread of FUD, inadvertently or intentionally, which isn't my concern. Either way you are a vector for memes that harm humanity and so are culpable.
> Understanding infectious diseases and taking proper personal hygiene measures along with having clean drinking water and plumbing/sewage had much more to do with the decline in infectious diseases than vaccines ever did. The effectiveness of vaccines is highly overstated.
What?
The only way its overstated is if you don't know what you are talking about.
Firstly : Small pox is not cured by clean hands.
Secondly: No one is giving vaccines anything more than their due. Well until anti vaxxers showed up, and once you have a radical voice shouting about something, the only signal you get is high contrast and caricratured. Before vaxxers showed up, vaccines were generally a part of a larger series of protections to help human beings. They were pretty awesome, and awesome in their own right.
This didnt mean that people stopped valuing hygiene or its place in healthcare. One of the most famous recent examples going around in literary articles has been about how doctor hygiene standards have gone up after they saw what kinds of germs they were carrying.
> Pharma companies have billions if not
Do you think pharma companies, doctors and scientists exist in a vaccum?
They are governed by medical bodies, malpractice laws, and by the larger will of the people.
And Doctors have their licenses and their liberty at risk if they poison you.
If a drug or technique was found to be dangerous, the people who pushed it on the population while knowing the consequences get fined in billions, and more.
> there is a very long list
Please share this list, I would like to see it.
> There is convincing evidence from scientists like a certain CDC whistleblower
Please go ahead and share the papers and peer reviewed articles showing this to be true.
> when there's not been an equivalent explosion in those infectious diseases
What?
They've changed the method and medium to give people their doses. As kids in India we used to have to get several painful injections, which often left scars. Theyve found other ways to get it done today.
> double blind trials
What? I'm going to test a vaccine on an infant by giving another infant the fucking black death!??!?
What the heck are you on?
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Look if you believe this stuff, and actually are fair and credulous - spend the exact same amount of effort and time research WHY vaccines work instead of the brain manipulative stuff left out by anti vaxxers.
Given enough N number of an event, something weird will happen.
But given that outside of America's bizarre discussion - billions of people have been vaccinated, over generations, to no known trends or losses, I'd say that vaccines are worth using.
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This kind of debate is how Fox News and the rest of them made global warming into a debateable issue.
This is how creationism became credible to the general public.
You can ask these "reasonable" questions, and over fit on edge cases for anything. You can then present it to normal people and make it seem like that there is some issue.
Expert positions are discredited by saying there's a vast conspiracy, and that experts have a financial stake in the matter.
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Please stop doing this shit as a country.
You'll have perfected the art of making falsehoods credible forces in public discourse.
I could understand if this happened in some country where education was not widely available. But if it's happening in America, the first of the first world, and its deeply troubling.
These things are designed, planned and unleashed. America ends up acting as a massive proof of concept.
If you'll can't stop these kind of manufactured debates from spreading, then I don't know what the rest of the world will do.
It's not about your body. It's about the society you're a part of and herd immunity. If you choose not to vaccinate, you are putting everyone else at risk.
So yeah, you can choose not to vaccinate, but you need to understand that if you do so, the rest of society has a right (and in many cases an obligation) to say "we don't want you here, if you're not vaccinated (for any reason other than medically unfit to be vaccinated) then you don't get to participate in our society, you don't get to put our members at risk, and you need to stay the hell away from us".
If the premise is that you are responsible for your own body, then shouldn't you also be responsible for any consequences that occur as a result of your choice to opt-out?
As a non-vaccinated person, carrying a disease that would normally be vaccinated against, can you be held responsible in the event that the disease you carry infects, for instance, a child that is not yet old enough to be vaccinated against that particular disease, or infects someone who was unable to be vaccinated due to other medical reasons? Should you be fined or prosecuted in the event that your choice to opt-out can be directly linked to a significant health event?
It's hard to talk about disease on an individual basis. A person's choices with respect to their own health has an impact on the individuals around them, and I do think that people should be mindful of the community when making lifestyle choices. I'm not saying a person shouldn't make their own choices, but should accept that those choices aren't just going to affect their own individual health in many cases.
>Maybe, but there's probably something to be said for social cost that make that argument somewhat less valid. Herd immunity. Seat belt and helmet laws, etc. Note that I am not taking a position here on vaccinations or anything else, just that it's not the best point one could make (other than for some casual amusement at cognitive gear grinding and confusion). It'd be the same as making fun of someone with anti-abortion views by saying "but death penalty lol isn't all life valuable!?" - which I am certain many have said and heard, but this type of arguing doesn't actually approach the reality behind issues and beliefs and positions.
The purpose isn't to be a jerk. The purpose is to cause anyone to pause and think through their position more thoroughly. What rules should apply, when and when not. Without searching more deeply for a more principled position it will come down to "because that's how I feel". But that's not how someone else feels. And what makes one person's feelings more important or superior to another's?
So, when does society get more say than you over your body?
Personally I don't think we should use and rely on the law to try to legislate away stupidity. We should use compassionate education. Yeah, I know, it sucks we have to be patient and not everyone will get on board. The only other option is to imprison and kill all the people that don't agree with you.
I understand that it's not maybe intended to be a jerk or has the deeper purpose of getting someone to rethink their position more carefully. But it's just a bit of a jerk-ish way to do so (in my view) - one that may be perceived as an attack on someone's intelligence and critical thinking abilities. It sets people on the defensive.
I try to take a more-flies-with-honey method myself - challenge the person to go through this process positively, and having demonstrated that you have tried to understand their viewpoint. It may make them more likely to understand yours, too.
As others have said and I hinted at, there are some things where societal benefit may and should outweigh individual belief. Laws are not always the most effective, or only way, to achieve these ends. Education is valuable.
Note that I am not taking a position here on vaccinations or anything else, just that it's not the best point one could make (other than for some casual amusement at cognitive gear grinding and confusion).
It'd be the same as making fun of someone with anti-abortion views by saying "but death penalty lol isn't all life valuable!?" - which I am certain many have said and heard, but this type of arguing doesn't actually approach the reality behind issues and beliefs and positions.
This is the main reason I'm thankful for HN and the mods. Reading and participating in the discussions has challenged me to work on my discourse technique. Particularly with reigning in my level of emotional investment in my positions, which for me is and has been difficult.
That incident really has stuck in my mind, in that even on topics of passion, a calm more detached approach can eek out information and points of view we wouldn't otherwise get.
That's a hard but important lesson for even the best of us to learn. Especially for myself being a combat vet type of alpha male who learned the contrarian and abrasive style of debate from Christopher Hitchens. (Though I think that method still has a time in place, I think there are less situations where it's appropriate)
Maybe if you are intellectually honest and discuss topics instead of talking points, you might get a different response. I've had some pleasant discussions with Trump supporters when we actually talked about real problems (not imagined terrorizing hordes, which is a manifestation of the right's own 'hysteria') and Trump's proposed solutions would or would not fix them. The ones that come straight away with "THE MEDIA IS MAKING EVERYTHING UP!!!"... not so much.