Scenario repeats for any other infectious disease: Measles, Mumps, etc.

People now don’t know what quarantine can be like, how stressful it is on the family. Nor do they remember how scary and deadly these “minor” diseases are. Try reading any books from the 1800′s or early 1900′s. All these “minor” diseases were feared as child killers.

Re: shingles. Yeah, the outbreak itself may not be deadly. However, the secondary infections from scratching, the pain and the possible long-term sequelae, can be. Just ask any adult who has HAD shingles if they wished they could have had a vaccine against them.

Dusty Murray Says:
April 18th, 2009 at 7:12 pm
Vaccines are not safe, nor are they effective. Period.

How many cases of polio were there last year? How about smallpox?

JB of Brisbane Says:
@Zodi, re Chicken Pox: “She wanted to protect us from the deadly adult version, Shingles”.

If only she had said that to the doctor when she took you in: he would have laughed in her face and told her to get out. Unless I am sadly mistaken, shingles is not deadly.

More probably, the doctor would have clarified for her that adults who contract chicken pox are more likely to die from it than teenagers and adolescents.

Shingles is actually not a new infection (if I’m understanding it correctly) but rather a recurrence of an old infection. The varicella vaccines probably does (but is not yet approved by the FDA to) protect people who have had chickenpox from later getting shingles. For this reason, it has been used in the elderly, reportedly with significant success in reducing shingles rates.

Shingles isn’t something to shrug off, either. You can get it repeatedly, it’s debilitating, and it has a significant likelihood of causing permanent disability. This may be blindness, but it may also be neuralgia, paralysis, deafness, or other problems associated with nerve damage. Beall’s Palsy is one possible result. That’s paralysis of one side of the face, and depending on how bad it is, it can be quite disfiguring, sometimes permanently so.

I just looked up the Wikipedia article on shingles, and it says that about 20% of patients will develop neuralgia that lasts after the shingles outbreak is over. Neuralgia can be horrible; it’s persistent, often untreatable pain not related to any actual pain stimulus. Sometimes the only cure is to kill the affected nerve, but that’s often not possible.

Simplified I know, but sometimes simple explains the complex things I do not have time to go into from work

You seem to be of the opinion that Phil is stating that vaccines are 100% effective and 100% safe. However, that’s just my assumption, since you don’t actually specify what particular details with which you disagree.

As Phil (and generally most people who are well-informed on the issue) would likely say, vaccines, just as every other medicine, has adverse side effects. Also, they are not always effective. However, for the general population, the success rate and benefits of the vaccine outweigh the risks of the vaccine and the risks of not vaccinating. In this regard, vaccines are “safe”. They also have a fairly high success rate (approx. 80%-90%, depending on the vaccine, though some, like TB, fall below that rate), meaning that they are “effective”.

When it comes to discussing any medical product, “safe” and “effective” are relative terms, and are never absolute. I’m sure Phil would agree.

If only she had said that to the doctor when she took you in: he would have laughed in her face and told her to get out. Unless I am sadly mistaken, shingles is not deadly.

I most certainly hope that the doctor would not laugh and kick her out. I would hope that he would tell her that while Shingles is not deadly, it is extremely painful (I can attest to this from my own experience) and, in some case, could lead to blindness.

And, frankly, any doctor that would laugh at a patient’s lack of knowledge about a medical condition probably should find another line of work…

I actually would like to have the Americans keep the samples to work with, I know we can learn a lot from them. But the only way to get the Russians to incinerate them would be if we did as well. Let’s just eliminate this nasty bug from the planet once and for all.

But we were also aware of the much bigger risks posed by not immunizing them.

Immunize your children.

Well said. I have a 4 year-old nephew, immunized right on schedule. If he were to be one of the very few who experienced significant injury / disability from one of his vaccinations…

I would be devastated. I would be angry. But it would not change one iota the fact that vaccines ARE safe and ARE effective for the vast majority. All aspects of life have risk.

@Quasar – Come on… Even the antivaccinationists accept that vaccines do indeed prevent disease.

Dusty Murray Says:
April 18th, 2009 at 7:12 pm

Vaccines – Do your homework.

Denial is a crucial step to truth. Vaccines are not safe, nor are they effective. Period.

I can poke as many holes in your scientific theory as you can mine.

Try.

If only she had said that to the doctor when she took you in: he would have laughed in her face and told her to get out. Unless I am sadly mistaken, shingles is not deadly. There used to be a belief dating back to ancient times that shingles would prove fatal if it completely encircled a person’s waist, but shingles nearly always affects a small part of the body on one side only, so it is likely that no one has ever seen a case of shingles going all the way around. Then, like the Korean belief that you will die if you go to sleep with a fan blowing on you, the story got spread all over by rumour and anecdote.

Pharma companies may be motivated by profit, but they also still provide a valuable service preventing very horrific diseases from effecting the rest of us. Even aspirin is not without side effects – but the greater good totally outweighs the risk to the individual (which is very, very uncommon).

The one thing that is apparent in your argument is that you have not researched the cost /benefit side of the vac. argument. Neither, it appears, have you considered the relative probabilities of death/disability of vaccinated vs unvaccinated. It varies from one disease to another but in general, the serious side effects of vaccination are about 1/million, vs anywhere from 1/100 to as high as a 90 percent death rate(ebola), even 100 % in the case of rabies(but only for those showing symptoms).

Note that if small pox were to be re-introduced into the general population, the death rate would depend upon the original population,ie, for European populations, about 30%. For Native Americans, nearly 98%.

The probability of dying in an auto accident is about 1/50,000. For air travel it’s about 1/4 million. If the odds were closer to 30%, I expect few would ever climb into a car or plane, yet anti-vaxers are quite content to expose their children to diseases that could have just such odds of death.

Vaccinations save a LOT more lives than they cost despite the supposed nefarious intent of the pharmaceutical industry.

When I was a child, it was still generally accepted that a large percentage of our children would die before reaching adulthood, so parents were not as obsessed with their children as we are today. Families were large(8 to 15 kids in a family) to compensate for those losses.
Today, we have 1 to 3 children, and the loss of even a single one is highly traumatic. Be glad you have the chance to be so dedicated to your children. It was not always thus,,,but it could be so again,,,just don’t vaccinate and watch the death rates rise.

Gary 7

Quite possibly true, but quite possibly not where in the middle you think it is.

“Vaccines save lives.”

Yes.

“Vaccines cause damage.”

Yes.

“Both of those things can be true at the same time.”

Yes.

“And yet both of them have been proven false in cases as well.”

Pardon?

“This is certainly not a black and white issue.”

Well, possibly not.

But remember, in general the death rate from vaccines is a tiny fraction of the death rate from the diseases they protect against. The problem with what you say is that people may interpret what you say as vaccines being a 50-50 prospect, when the evidence suggests they’re *much* safer than that.

I’d be curious for you to spell out in more detail your concerns about vaccines, and the evidence you have to support those concerns.

One thing Ive noticed about your blog is that you are very black and white. You have concrete unbending views on religion and scientific theories. I guess I tend toward some of those same views but when it comes to vaccine safety and efficacy, I can see the grey in a way I think maybe you can’t (which, you seem to rationalize, makes you right or more researched – neither of which is true). And it isn’t based on anecdotes, memes or unfounded fears.

One of the things I like about discussions such as the one to which you linked is that there are rational conversations happening with mostly respectful exchanges of information by people who mostly understand that this IS a grey area issue, legitimately, from a scientific and medical perspective. I can poke as many holes in your scientific theory as you can mine. The truth is most likely somewhere in the middle. Vaccines save lives. Vaccines cause damage. Both of those things can be true at the same time. And yet both of them have been proven false in cases as well. This is certainly not a black and white issue.

If vaccines aren’t responsible for the reductions in disease rates, then what is? Also, why is it that these reductions are most noticeable immediately after the introdution of vaccines for those diseases?

“@ Phil Plait: Gravitational and EM interaction causing autism. ROFL”

What?

“If you use EM interaction or gravitaltional interaction to manipulate someting on a subatomic scale, that means manipulating something particle by particle, well, then you can do a lot of things!”

What? You’re still not making sense.