Yeah, nice skeptical thinking there. If you’re going to be skeptical then question everything, not just things that go against what you want to believe. I love the people in here referring to “studies” that I betting they just read about and took at face value without researching at all the facts of the study.

Skeptics. Yeah. Most of you wouldn’t know a skeptical thought if you tripped over it. There’s bad information on both sides of vaccines. You can’t just believe the stuff that supports your view and discount the stuff that doesn’t. There’s people with agendas on both sides. Take anything at face value at your own risk.

Be a real skeptic and question everything and everyone. You might just learn something for yourself instead and something you didn’t even plan on finding.

Good for you! Human Papilloma Virus can cause cervical cancer (alliteration accidental).

http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Skinner/Pigeon/

Any time there is an event and a proximal event it could reasonably be assumed that one causes the other, until you actually test it by withholding the supposed cause. If vaccinations were the cause, autism rates should have shot up at the advent of vaccination. If mercury was the cause, autism should have declined at the inception of the FDA and been rampant before this. Every hatter should have had autistic children.

Mounting evidence, however, suggests that brain changes in autism occur before birth at stages of development involving migration of brain cells and affected by maternal hormone balance, and even more interestingly that inflammatory cytokinines alleviate some of the social symptoms of autism in mild to moderate cases. If inflammation or injury were a cause, wouldn’t further stress exacerbate symptoms? The summary is that symptoms appear around age two, which just so happens to be when children are in the middle of vaccination. The brain changes are already there.

Think for yourself. Don’t be a pigeon.

And for the purposes of full disclosure: I have a seven year old autistic son who has been vaccinated.

It is indeed curious that anti-vacciners argue that both vaccine failure rate V and vaccine reaction rate R are high, which by my thinking is still a contentious configuration for the prisoner’s dilemma matrix.

You’re approaching the question as though the anti-vaccine crowd holds their position rationally. By and large, this is a group strongly convinced that vaccines cause autism (see Hydro’s comment earlier in the thread), in spite of (a) no evidence for that claim and (b) copious amounts of evidence against it. I’ve spent some time following their antics online, and it’s clear these folks are impervious to evidence.

Show me a vaccination advocate who holds that low V actually diminishes the case for intrusive public policy…

What do you mean by “low”? How low should it be before we make vaccination optional?

The folks I’ve met in public health are well aware of the strengths and limitations of vaccines, and are primarily concerned with maintaining herd immunity and keeping the general population healthy. Why should they also have the responsibility to push for a libertarian agenda? And how do you ensure that the vaccination rate is sufficient to maintain herd immunity if vaccination is optional? Last I checked, getting immunizations isn’t even all that intrusive (and requiring them forces insurances companies to cover them; it’s usually not too difficult to dodge that requirement if you really care to do so).

Perhaps they are not as selfish as you think. Perhaps they are arguing their convictions for the greater good, just as vaccine advocates are.

It is indeed curious that anti-vacciners argue that both vaccine failure rate V and vaccine reaction rate R are high, which by my thinking is still a contentious configuration for the prisoner’s dilemma matrix. Similarly, vaccine advocates typically contend that vaccines are safe and effective — that V and R are low — which should militate towards a public policy of individual self-determination.

Show me a vaccination advocate who holds that low V actually diminishes the case for intrusive public policy and respects the wishes of those who opt out not to be included in the statistical case for compulsory measures. (I don’t count.) Then maybe we’ll have found the two people who won’t talk past each other.

…dismissing everyone who disagrees with you as moon-hoaxers or Mars-facers does not help your case.

Show me an anti-vaccination advocate who holds their position for the reasons you describe, and I’ll admit you have a point. The only anti-vax activists I’ve encountered on the interwebs erroneously argue that vaccination causes autism, or that it fills us with “toxins”, or even that the germ theory of disease is false. The folks making these claims have earned a place in the same boat as the moon-hoaxers and Mars-facers.

The problem with your point is that while it gives a rational reason some people may refuse vaccination, it gives no rational reason for people to advocate against vaccination (indeed, in the game-theoretical scenario you would expect a “skipper” to encourage other people to be vaccinated, to decrease their own chances of contracting disease).

Moreover, while it’s interesting to consider the case when V goes to zero, real-life vaccines tend to have a non-trivial failure rate.

In a simple model, vaccination can be represented as an n-prisoners’ dilemma. Vaccine-skippers have a probability N * I of contracting the disease, where I is the disease incidence, and N is the unvaccinated transmission factor. Vaccine-takers have probability V * I, where V is the vaccinated transmission factor, but they also suffer probability R of suffering a reaction to the vaccine. N, V and R are constants, but I may be highly dependent on the proportion of vaccinated people.

The n-prisoners’ dilemma occurs when a vaccine-skipper can free-ride on the herd immunity provided by the vaccine-takers. This happens only when a vaccine-skipper both helps himself and harms vaccine-takers with his individual action. The n-prisoners’ dilemma constitutes a compelling moral argument for collective public policy intervention.

Not all parameter values of N, V, R, and I produce an n-prisoners’ dilemma. Obviously, the “vaccine” is only useful for V << N and R << 1. An especially interesting case occurs when V goes to zero – i.e., the vaccine is perfectly effective against the disease. In this case, the vaccine-skippers do not harm the vaccine-takers in any way, and therefore there is no prisoner’s dilemma. Perhaps there is some other altruistic moral case for protecting the sinning vaccine-skippers by becoming a saintly vaccine-taker, but it does not remotely rise to the level as when the prisoner’s dilemma is in force. Furthermore, when V approaches 0, rational self-interested actors will drive the risk for either decision towards R, a pareto-efficient outcome. So the case for universal vaccination is not particularly utilitarian, either.

Real vaccines match this simple model to varying degrees and have differing (and often unknown) parameter values. In some parts of this state-space, rational people with different priors may indeed reach different conclusions. I have no use for vaccine conspiracy theorists either, but dismissing everyone who disagrees with you as moon-hoaxers or Mars-facers does not help your case. So no, I am not with you, even though I gladly got my flu shot this season.

Check out Dr. Mark Crislip’s podcasts at http://quackcast.com/QuackCast/Podcasts/Podcasts.html and especially episode 20 about Influenza myths. Mark is an infectious disease specialist and does a terrific job of blasting WOO.

-Tom

i haven’t gotten the flu since my house mate who worked at a grocery store moved to Buffalo last year. they give us free flu shots here at Ivy U ™, but i just didn’t bother, as i almost never get sick.

i do approve of shots for those at risk… but i’m pretty macha…

dani, the tatter

Lessee… most of the people “down on prayer” were so based on the concept of people solely using prayer/other irrational remedies. It cannot be denied that there are indeed some people who do that. Those people are generally wahoos. Prayer itself makes the one praying feel better about themselves, if nothing else, but has no apparent scientific efficacy outside of personal anecdote.

If people want to slap themselves in the face before doing something useful, that’s their right. Maybe they have a good reason to slap themselves in the face; I don’t know. Still, one must understand that slapping oneself in the face looks silly to some people and going “BUT IT’S NOT SILLY BECAUSE OF… UM… IT’S NOT” isn’t entirely effective or indeed productive at all.

Case in point, children are required by our state (and many others) to be vaccinated against Hepatitis C before entering school. Hep C is transmitted from blood-to-blood contact, primarily through sexual intercourse and intravenous drug use, which I hope are not vectors found in my child’s school!

The arguement for requiring this vaccination in childhood is that it will provide protection when the child is older and may make these risky choices. Mind you, the risk of a Hep C pandemic is almost nil due to the nature of transmission.

Sorry, my libertarian nature tells me that the limited beneift to society from 100% imunity is trumped by the individual’s right to choice on the matter.

(BTW, I have had both my children vacinated for Hep C, but that was our choice. My daughter is also recieving the HPV vaccine, but again, becasue we decided it was right for our child.)

And you’re right, when Jennifer Garner opens her mouth, it’s hard to look at anything else

How are you concluding that you have immunity from some strains of
HIV? Simply having sex with someone who’s positive for it doesn’t
imply that you will catch it any given time, especially if their viral load is low (as is often the case during non-acute infection and when it has still not advanced to AIDS, especially if they’re taking medications). Moreover, most tests are likely to give false negatives up to a few months after exposure (since your body takes time to produce antibodies which is what most lab tests search for).

There have been a few well-publicized cases of groups that apparently were more resistant to HIV infection, but it’s harder to make that judgment on an individual basis. Also, any acquired immune response to some strain is likely to be more fleeting than any flu shot given the mutation rate of HIV (reverse transcriptase has a very high error rate).

As far as flu shots and the like are concerned, keep in mind that they are intended not only to help you, but to reduce the fraction of the population that can serve as incubators for a virus that can be deadly (even if not to all the vaccinated folks).

I got my flu shot in October. My employer, who just so happens to be a state Department of Community Health, offered several flu shot clinics in our offices throughout October and November.

The good news, most of the shots were covered by our insurance. Even so, the cost in the early season is only about $35.

Even so, I’ve also seen many places providing low-cost flu shots, like my local grocery store’s pharmacy. In fact, the shots are down to the bargain basement price of $10.

[[Barton, what was the point of bringing up religion in your post? I haven’t seen anyone blame fundamentalists for this. ]]

Look again. You haven’t been reading the thread very carefully. One post specifically blamed the resistance to vaccination on “fundamentalists,” another was down on prayer.

[[It is a sad state when falicy and prayer rules the day.]]

I’m praying you change your mind.

I think it would be very difficult to prove empirically that the shots work. If you get sick after the shot, who’s to say you wouldn’t have become sick without it? … Is there a good way to prove the flu vaccination’s efficacy other than just pointing to the success of the polio vaccine?

There’s a method for answering questions like this. It’s called science.

All snark aside, the question you’re asking applies to any medical treatment. The randomized, placebo-controlled, double-blind trial is designed specifically to answer such a question. That is how we demonstrate the efficacy of vaccines, not by “pointing to the success of the polio vaccine” (generally speaking, the fact that vaccine A works gives no evidence for the claim that vaccine B works). You can even find the articles yourself on PubMed. A search for “vaccine double-blind” gives nearly 1800 results.

To think there is no possible connection is ridiculous.

Why? Because one happened after the other? The claim you’re making is the very definition of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. “B happens after A” does not imply “B happens because of A.”

Remember Purity Of Essence, Peace On Earth.