i’m for vaccines–i agree that they have saved millions of lives and are among the greatest achievements of medical science. But why has the number of required vaccinations has nearly tripled in the past 25 years? I’m 37, had the required vaccinations as a child, and grew up hale and hearty. Why do today’s kids need so many more vaxx than I did?

That part of my comment was addressed to him.

As for vaccine trials. Yeah I still approve of them. We’re not exposing them to anymore risk than they would already see in their daily lives before a vaccine existed. It is not actively injecting someone with a disease.

Maybe you could argue there is moral hazard at play and those that believe they are vaccinated are more reckless with their health precautions.

And that rebuttal of The Atlantic article was rather long and vitriolic. I was looking for good statistics. Not a tit for tat.

Apparently in your case, it is.

Dang, I guess we can do away with the hand sanitizers and antimicrobial soap now, eh? I always notice how pseudoscientists like to pull vocabulary out of physics. Granted, normally a great choice (disclosure: my degree was in physics), as Rutherford obnoxiously put it: “Physics is the only true science, everything else is stamp collecting.” Sadly, antivaxxers, in the view of Rutherford (who got his Nobel in chemistry much to his chagrin) would be over in the philatelic camp.

“without extension in time and space” indeed. Sounds rather scientific-ky doesn’t it? Has some kind of Einsteinian ring to it, no? As if diseases and the vaccines created to prevent them would be capable of travelling anywhere near the speed of light (3 x 10E10 meters per second, or really, really fast, or, if you’re doing your physics homework: c=1). But we all know what it means: Nothing. Zilch. Nada. Pseudoscience is full of these zero information phrases, and tend to pull their words from physics more than any other science. Chemists and geologists may have a few cranks, but they all pale in comparison to what physicists have to put up with. Everyone wants to be seen as the next Einstein, but not the next Pauling.

How many quacks and contemporary snake oil peddlers base their pitches on “quantum” something or other? Or “relativistic” hoozawazit? It’s akin to the funny mish mash of “engrish”. Except we kind of understand what the poor soul who was tasked to write/tranlsate the manual for our imported gadget meant to say. We have no clue what these phonies who steal physics vocabulary are trying to say. Well, other than “trust me, it’s complicated, just buy this thing I’m selling.”

The funny thing is that despite this appropriation of the words, pseudoscientists rarely use the true language of physics: Math. Math that makes your head hurt and requires the use of letters that are used to sell tasty Greek cuisine. Mmmm, greek food.

Then what, pray tell, is in the scanning electron micrograph at the top of this picture?

You might have been able to make your argument sound convincing a couple of centuries ago, when germs were just a theory. Now that we’ve actually seen them and have a pretty good understanding of how they physically cause disease, you’ve got a lot more evidence to explain away.

Vaccinating a person against polio triggers their immune system to produce antibodies which will bind to poliovirus. These antibodies physically prevent the virus from bonding to receptor sites on cells and gaining entry — one could compare it to the police putting a boot on an illegally parked car, disabling the car. We know this because it has been observed, and because the chemistry and immunology all say it will work, and because experimental evidence shows that when people are vaccinated against poliovirus, they do not develop poliomyelitis even when exposed, and mass vaccination campaigns are consistently accompanied by a dramatic decline in the number of cases (with and without comorbitities or death).

We know what poliovirus does. We know what antibodies to polio do. We know how to trigger the immune system to produce such antibodies. We know that vaccines are effective at providing this trigger (because of trials in which volunteers received the vaccine and had their blood tested for proper seroconversion).

You will need to find alternate explanations for all of that if you wish to be at all convincing.

Deaths by smallpox have been replaced by other morbidities equally conditioned by poor nutrition, lack of clean water, and lately, GMO food.

If this is true, why has the human population exploded in the last few decades? Why has life expectancy increased rather than remaining static? (Note: good food and clean water protects you from dysentery and cholera, but it doesn’t protect you from smallpox.)

Koch was wrong. By reducing the symptom picture to the elements in common, he missed the unique qualities of each individual. Suffering is always particular. Industrial medicine is always universal. To fit the universal into the particular, the theoretical foundation has to be created ex nihilo.

The theoretical foundation of vaccines is a mess. Epidemiological investigation is a political and industrial tool. Any symptom can be attributed to any cause so long as it fits the prerogatives of the investigating agency. And, if the symptom appears to be caused by vaccines, then the cause is almost always a coincidence.

A change in the symptom picture is called a success for vaccines. Whereas, the death and suffering actually increases. Deaths by smallpox have been replaced by other morbidities equally conditioned by poor nutrition, lack of clean water, and lately, GMO food.

Disabilities and death prevented by vaccines have been superseded by an epidemic of brain dysfunction, immune failure, and CNS disorders on an unprecedented scale.

Vaccines are the modern plague.

The smallpox virus has been sequenced, for one. It’s quite conceivable that someone could recreate it without any stored virus at all. In fact, that possibility is one reason for destroying the remaining sample: if we really needed to, we could replace them from bits and bytes, which are much less infectious.

Even without full-up viral synthesis, variola is only a few codons away from a common animal pathogen; that’s almost certainly its origin. Modifying that animal virus would be easier for those who don’t have the means to synthesize it from scratch.

Considering some of the toxic insanity that prominent antivaxxers have spread in the past regarding the “essential role” that measles (for one) plays in human development, it wouldn’t take much of a mutation for them to crossbreed with the “Animal Rights” groups. The hybrid would strike a blow for species preservation by liberating smallpox to once again play its essential role in the world.