By the Numbers: Vaccines Are Safe

It's even worse: there are no reputable claims that vaccines are unsafe (in the sense anti-vaccination advocates mean, anyway).

The only semi-scientific paper was the one which sparked it all, by Andrew Wakefield [0], who is:

> "a discredited former British doctor who became an anti-vaccine activist. He was a gastroenterologist until he was struck off the UK medical register for unethical behaviour, misconduct, and dishonesty for authoring a fraudulent research paper that claimed a link between the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism and bowel disease"

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Wakefield

My great grandmother lived through the last smallpox outbreak in Canada, where their boarder caught it and she had to be quarantined.

My grandmother told us about how she come back to school after summer vacation and found out about friends that died from measles.

I had a vice principal who had polio as a child.

None of those are around now, although measles is making a run for it.

There are still loads of men around that have decreased fertility or even infertilitt due to mumps. Without ever asking around I know at least three men that had fertility problems, probably due to severe orchitis after mumps.

In Sweden they included mumps in the vaccination programme 1975ish, which probably means the USA got it sometime during the 60s. That means you have probably all met someone that had testicle or pancreas inflammation due to mumps. Both of them very very painful.

that's not the right breakdown; it's really far-left progressive democrats who associate with natural living.

A nontrivial amount of opposition to vaccines comes from communities, both online and in person, that circulate accounts of atrocities committed by authorities. Naturally, accounts of mistreatment, whether or not its systemic nature is seeming or proven, will weaken trust in institutions. Good actors are always having to compensate for the activities of bad actors, even if those bad actors were in the distant past.

But it says a lot about our society and the quality of our institutions that the lack of trust isn't just among groups that have themselves been mistreated, but is also found in others who observe these issues of social justice from a position of relative privilege. Based on their observations, some of them have concluded that it's far from certain that malice, corruption, or lack of transparency don't factor into the mainstream stance on this issue today, likely because there is evidence that similar factors were at play in similar issues in the past, and the incentive structure of actors and organizations need not have meaningfully changed.

>why'd you divide 400 by 3M? the article says, per your quote, that there were 400 american deaths per year. but 3M infected americans _total_. there is no per year qualifier on that part.

Because it's a hack article. From https://www.cdc.gov/measles/about/history.html the numbers are annual. I remember seeing the 1/1000 number were of the reported case (ie, hospitals) - almost everyone use to get the measles before they were 15 and most cases were not reported.

> also you forgot to address the part about: >> One in four people who get measles are likely to be hospitalized

Sorry - you're right. That's such a complete, outright lie - I guess my brain didn't even register it. As I mentioned - almost 100% of the people use to get measles (see CDC link). Clearly not 1/4 of them were hospitalized.

>i don't know about you, but i'll take a vaccination over a hospitalization in most realistic situations i can imagine.

Then you should learn about some of the stories of people that have been damaged. You can either read some of the reports from VAERS or watch some of the personal story videos from the VAXXED youtube channel.

Note - I'm not saying VAXXED is science.. I'm not saying their conclusions are right.. Yes - the stories are anecdotal - but these are real people with stories about how they had a healthy child and then after one or several vaccines, they didn't. You can listen to some and say.. "well.. that's a stretch to say the vaccines caused this". But you should listen to some of them.

It's a much messier story than the media, CDC or the pharmaceutical companies would have you to believe. My point is not that we should not vaccinate, but that should be informed and take the risks and benefits into consideration (Data-Driven/Led). The current approach overplays the benefits (by exaggerating the danger) and underplaying the risks.

No, I don't imply that vaccines caused the increase, however, the NYT writers make it seem that vaccination caused it. Also the article doesn't say what part of added mortality is amid the vaccinated people. If your reading was correct, and doctors killed 7-15 times as many as nature, because they vaxed kids unfit for vaccination, it would make the argument much worse; but the authors didn't say that.

Thus the article in the NYT, by a Pulitzer prize winner no less, attempting to reconcile trust issues, ends up as a pile of randomly copy-pasted data. I'd say this communication has started on a wrong foot. If a reporter of a huge newspaper can't be arsed to get it right, what kind of trust can we have in underpaid, anonymous government clerks, responsible for both scientific evaluation and logistic execution of vaccination?