I’m not comparing anything or assessing the value of any particular life. What I’m saying is that from a governmental perspective there’s a certain abstract nature to the problem of public health. The government has to think of aggregates, not individuals. If there is some risk of death or injury to some percentage of a population for a given treatment, wouldn’t they have to weigh that against the potential benefit? I.e. compare the potential savings in healthcare costs, lost productivity, etc to the potential risks of loss (life, health, compensation funds).

Just a thought.

I’ve been told that a primary factor in the addition of the chickenpox vaccine to the schedule was the private sector losing some amount of productive hours per year from parents who were out to care for their sick children. Is that true or just paranoid skepticism? I don’t know. I don’t claim its true, but at some level it wouldn’t surprise me. I’d like to think that the public health officials are really truly just interested in preventing as much disease as possible, but having recently been tangentially involved in a political issue I trust politicians about as far as I can throw them.

“Whomever mentioned the “herd” coverage of vaccines hit on something important. To the government we’re just a herd to be managed based on relative costs of epidemics vs. compensation funds, even if some small percentage die or are perpanently injured. If you want to be part of the herd then that’s your choice.

I hope you aren’t comparing the costs of human lives to the cost of compensation funds. While I think that the government is far from perfect, and that there are occasionally ulterior motives, I feel that in the case of vaccines, the main focus is on public health and the prevention of needless loss of lives or debilitating injury.

There are instances where an individual should not receive a vaccine due to a contraindicating condition. Those individuals receive the benefits of the vaccine due to herd immunity. I.e., because a large enough percentage of the community around them are immune, as long as they remain within that immunized community, they are safe, as well. If the immunization rate falls or they leave that community, then they are at risk for infection. So, when someone refuses to get vaccinated for reasons other than being contraindicated, they are not only putting themselves at increased risk for infection, but also those around them who also, for whatever reason, have not been vaccinated.

There are risks involved, true. Some are foreseeable, others not so much. But when a decision is made to not be vaccinated, such a decision should be weighed carefully, bearing in mind the effect of that decision on family, friends, and strangers around you.

I’m glad to hear you aren’t completely anti-vaccine. However, some of your comments have made me think, “Skepticism is good, but there is such a thing as too much skepticism.” Slate recently had a 3-part article about “paranoid skepticism” (The Paranoid Style in American Science, I believe was the title). Definitely worth a read.

Naked Bunny wrote: “Specifically, you are demanding that science prove a negative before you will accept the safety of anything.”

Many of you seem to have the impression that I am antivax, which is not true. I said I’m skeptical. I was mainly reacting to BA’s flippant “its a crock” comment which I found to be arrogant and dismissive. To LM, NB, and whomever it was who suggested we just space out the vaccines more, that’s precisely what we are doing. We judge each vaccine on its relative merits based on the severity of the disease(s), the potential of actually contracting the disease(s), our kids’ age, health, etc etc. If the kid so much as has a runny nose, we figure their system is already fighting something off, why would we want to smack it down even harder? There are only a couple that we’ve flat-out refused.

We try to make as informed a decision as we can. For a while we were even getting “reminders” from our HMO (sponsored by one of the big pharmaceuticals, btw) that we were missing “important” vaccinations on the schedule. If that doesn’t scream conflict-of-interest and/or profit-motive then I don’t know what does.

Whomever mentioned the “herd” coverage of vaccines hit on something important. To the government we’re just a herd to be managed based on relative costs of epidemics vs. compensation funds, even if some small percentage die or are perpanently injured. If you want to be part of the herd then that’s your choice.

There have been people pushing for Gardasil to be routine for all girls since it first came out. There are even people figuring it should be routine for all boys as well since they’re the vectors that spread it to the girls. Think of the windfall profits for the manufacturer if that happened. Think of all the money they’d be willing to contribute to the politicians who could approve such an addition to the standard schedule. If that isn’t enough to make you skeptical of the whole mess then there isn’t much left for me to say, I guess.

I feel for you, but I do need to disagree with your statement “It might as well never have happened.”

Yes, ABA is very expensive and a lot of school districts don’t want to cough up the money for it. But some do. More people need to lobby their local legislatures to try to get more funding put into the educational system for ABA. ABA has helped so many families and individuals.

Unfortunately for parents of autistic kids such as myself, the only treatment for autism which has any degree of scientific evidence that it works (i.e., ABA) is also the one treatment that most public school districts will never implement because it is too expensive. What good is scientific research if the fruits of such research are never implemented? It might as well never have happened.

Unfortunately, there are those who desperately need to understand what’s going on, who need to be able to point at something as the cause. And some of these people are extremely vocal (Jenny McCarthy, among those with celebrity). Sometimes, they prompt research that is very valuable, but at others, they promote a lot of nonsense that takes time away from more promising research and occasionally things that can put their children in serious risk of injury (e.g., chelation therapy).

Finally, in terms of not knowing how to treat it, there is a treatment that actually works quite well and has the science to back it up. Applied Behavior Analysis. It is tiring and time-consuming, but it does make a huge difference in the functioning level of a child with autism.