Vaccinations

[steve_bank]

Is it statistically more risky? There are reactions to vaccinations.

I watched a show that talked about vaccinations. One of the speakers was looking at the timing of child vaccinations. What she was looking at was the mass attack on a young immune systems by multiple vaccinations simultaneously and over short periods affecting immune system development.

 

[skepticalbip]

Is it statistically more risky?

Yes...

Diseases like small pox killed millions.

From Wiki on small pox deaths - "Between 20 and 60% of all those infected—and over 80% of infected children—died from the disease. During the 20th century, it is estimated that smallpox was responsible for 300–500 million deaths."

Since world wide small pox vaccinations had been instituted, small pox has pretty much been eliminated. You were most likely vaccinated against small pox as a child, Would you have preferred to have been exposed to someone dying from the disease and risk about a 50% chance of dying? Or are you content to have only been vaccinated with the weakened version that may have only left a small scar on your left shoulder?

Vaccines are eliminating once fairly common diseases; polio is likely gone, measles is now rare, chicken pox is now rare, etc. I'm an old fart and, when I was growing up, it was almost impossible to find a kid who had not had a case of measles and/or chicken pox - now a child that develops either is so rare that it makes the news.

 

[bilby]

Is it statistically more risky?

Getting a disease, rather than vaccination against it? Fuck yes. Massively more risky. Hence the very steep decline in deaths since vaccines were developed.

There are reactions to vaccinations.

Indeed. But they are both rare and (in most cases) easily managed.

I watched a show that talked about vaccinations. One of the speakers was looking at the timing of child vaccinations. What she was looking at was the mass attack on a young immune systems by multiple vaccinations simultaneously and over short periods affecting immune system development.

You should be more discriminating in what shows you watch. There is zero evidence that the recommended vaccination regime is harmful in any way. Humans evolved in an environment where 'mass attacks' by pathogens was the norm. The immune system has no problem coping with a few antigens attached to dead or attenuated pathogens. The whole idea is an utter nonsense hypothesis that is used by anti-vaccine lobbyists to try to justify their nutty beliefs.

It has no basis in reality; No theoretical basis, no observational basis, nothing other than 'it sounds plausible if you don't know anything about immunology - and most people don't know anything about immunology'.

It's pure propaganda.

 

[Angry Floof]

Getting a disease, rather than vaccination against it? Fuck yes. Massively more risky. Hence the very steep decline in deaths since vaccines were developed.

Indeed. But they are both rare and (in most cases) easily managed.

I watched a show that talked about vaccinations. One of the speakers was looking at the timing of child vaccinations. What she was looking at was the mass attack on a young immune systems by multiple vaccinations simultaneously and over short periods affecting immune system development.

You should be more discriminating in what shows you watch. There is zero evidence that the recommended vaccination regime is harmful in any way. Humans evolved in an environment where 'mass attacks' by pathogens was the norm. The immune system has no problem coping with a few antigens attached to dead or attenuated pathogens. The whole idea is an utter nonsense hypothesis that is used by anti-vaccine lobbyists to try to justify their nutty beliefs.

It has no basis in reality; No theoretical basis, no observational basis, nothing other than 'it sounds plausible if you don't know anything about immunology - and most people don't know anything about immunology'.

It's pure propaganda.

I got all my vaccinations from childhood and no matter how hard I try through decades of terrible lifestyle choices, I can't get my immune system to break.

 

[Jokodo]

Is it statistically more risky? There are reactions to vaccinations.

Yes. Did you even read the post above yours? Many vaccines may cause reactions because they function by exposing the patient with weakened or dead pathogens so they can develop an immune response as if confronted with the actual pathogen. The reaction is, so to so say, an infection with an incredibly trivial symptoms, almost by definition. A person who's likely to develop noticeable reactions to the vaccine is also a person where the actual disease is likely to take a particularly severe course, as they have a weak immune system either generally or low defenses against that particular pathogen.

Statistics can, in some marginal cases, lead to the conclusion that simple avoidance is safer than vaccinations - if the disease is so rare that the chance of actually contracting it if unvaccinated is 1 in a 10,000, and the average severity of an infection only 100 times more severe than the typical reactions to the vaccination, it might be rational from an individual perspective to skip the shot (though at a societal level due to herd immunity effects, vaccinating everyone is still the best option -- so this is actually a good argument for mandatory vaccinations). But purposeful exposure to a pathogen that hasn't been weakened is always going to be more risky than purposeful exposure to a weakened pathogen.

 

[PyramidHead]

Hoping everyone knows my original post to GeorgeS was parody and not what I actually believe.

 

[steve_bank]

If I were going to pursue the issue I would start with CDC data not post references..

In industrialized nations with good nutrition and heath care what is the risk of death or impairment due to measles and other diseases as a child.

as to the question posed by the show I watched on the impact of multiple simultaneous vaccinations on a still developing immune system, that sounds like a good question to pursue. Unless I am mistaken this is a science forum is it not?

 

[skepticalbip]

If I were going to pursue the issue I would start with CDC data not post references..

In industrialized nations with good nutrition and heath care what is the risk of death or impairment due to measles and other diseases as a child.

Thanks to vaccinations, the death rate from measles in the U.S. has declined precipitously. Considering that in the middle of the twentieth century childhood measles was quite common then there were many thousands of children dying from this disease (13.3 per 100,000). Today measles is rare enough that it becomes a newsworthy event when there is a measles outbreak.

https://physiciansforinformedconsent.org/measles/dis/

In the modern era, it is rare to suffer permanent disability or death from measles in the United States. Between 1900 and 1963, the mortality rate of measles dropped from 13.3 per 100,000 to 0.2 per 100,000 in the population, due to advancements in living conditions, nutrition, and health care—a 98% decline

 

[Tharmas]

If I were going to pursue the issue I would start with CDC data not post references..

In industrialized nations with good nutrition and heath care what is the risk of death or impairment due to measles and other diseases as a child.

Thanks to vaccinations, the death rate from measles in the U.S. has declined precipitously. Considering that in the middle of the twentieth century childhood measles was quite common then there were many thousands of children dying from this disease (13.3 per 100,000). Today measles is rare enough that it becomes a newsworthy event when there is a measles outbreak.

https://physiciansforinformedconsent.org/measles/dis/

In the modern era, it is rare to suffer permanent disability or death from measles in the United States. Between 1900 and 1963, the mortality rate of measles dropped from 13.3 per 100,000 to 0.2 per 100,000 in the population, due to advancements in living conditions, nutrition, and health care—a 98% decline

I can't help but notice that the quote you provide does not support your assertions. Mortality rate of 13.3 per 100,000 was at the beginning of the twentieth century, and by mid twentieth century (1963) the mortality rate had fallen to 0.2 per 100,000. That's all pre vaccine.

Graphic from the same article you reference:

 

[Angry Floof]

If I were going to pursue the issue I would start with CDC data not post references..

In industrialized nations with good nutrition and heath care what is the risk of death or impairment due to measles and other diseases as a child.

as to the question posed by the show I watched on the impact of multiple simultaneous vaccinations on a still developing immune system, that sounds like a good question to pursue. Unless I am mistaken this is a science forum is it not?

The anti-vax zealotry induced outbreaks in the last couple of months have caused hundreds of deaths so far.

900 in Madagascar
200 in the Philipines

Of course, those are foreign countries with lots of brown people, so they probably drink sewage, not the the U.S. where whole towns are poisoned with lead and health values are not the best and are declining.

It's spreading quite fast this year and last. http://fortune.com/2019/03/01/measles-cases-shock-rise/

Worldwide, there were nearly 300,000 cases of measles in 2018, which killed about 136,000 — deaths that could have been prevented with a simple vaccine. In the Ukraine, another 24,042 cases of measles have already been reported in the first two months of 2019, and in the Philippines, 12,736. Alarmingly, Brazil had no reported cases of measles in 2017, but more than 10,000 in 2018.

But, again, that's not the U.S. We'll have to wait and see what our body count will be. I'm sure it will magically be zero because 'Merica.

 

[bilby]

Thanks to vaccinations, the death rate from measles in the U.S. has declined precipitously. Considering that in the middle of the twentieth century childhood measles was quite common then there were many thousands of children dying from this disease (13.3 per 100,000). Today measles is rare enough that it becomes a newsworthy event when there is a measles outbreak.

I can't help but notice that the quote you provide does not support your assertions. Mortality rate of 13.3 per 100,000 was at the beginning of the twentieth century, and by mid twentieth century (1963) the mortality rate had fallen to 0.2 per 100,000. That's all pre vaccine.

Graphic from the same article you reference:

View attachment 20691

Well done on your clear demonstration of 'How to mislead with graphs'.

A number of modern medical techniques introduced after WWI allowed the death rate from Measles in the US to fall from the previously horrifying 5-15 per 100,000 to a mere few hundred per annum - few enough to barely register on your graph. Complications that had previously been fatal in many cases became merely terrifying and debilitating, which was a big step forward.

But this only tells us that your graph is incapable of detecting whether or not the vaccine was effective.

To determine that question, we need to zoom in a bit:



(Source)

Hundreds of deaths per annum in the US is a small number per 100,000 - but it's not a small number. And it's VERY significantly more than zero.

Choosing a scale that goes from 0 to 16 to hide an effect that ranges between 0 and 1 is very sneaky; And I suppose we could give the people who do this some credit for their cleverness - if they weren't using it to conceal the easily avoidable deaths of hundreds of children a year.


ETA - See that 'spike' in deaths in 1990? This was due to an epidemic in California, and that event was very closely studied, because it had been thought that Measles was a thing of the past. So why did it happen?

During 1988 through 1990, California experienced its worst measles epidemic in more than a decade, with 16,400 reported cases, 3,390 hospital admissions, and 75 deaths. More than half of the patients were younger than 5 years; the highest incidence was among infants younger than 12 months. The epidemic centered in low-income Hispanic communities in southern and central California. The major cause of the epidemic was low immunization levels among preschool-aged children and young adults. Rates of complications, admission to hospital, and death were surprisingly high. Outbreak control efforts met with indeterminate success. Problems with these efforts included insufficient funding early in the epidemic and disappointing public response to community-based immunization campaigns. The cost of medical care and outbreak control for the epidemic is conservatively estimated at $30.9 million. Unless the level of immunization in preschool-aged children is increased, this type of epidemic will probably recur.

(My bold. Source).

 

[Tharmas]

Well done on your clear demonstration of 'How to mislead with graphs'.

A number of modern medical techniques introduced after WWI allowed the death rate from Measles in the US to fall from the previously horrifying 5-15 per 100,000 to a mere few hundred per annum - few enough to barely register on your graph. Complications that had previously been fatal in many cases became merely terrifying and debilitating, which was a big step forward.

But this only tells us that your graph is incapable of detecting whether or not the vaccine was effective.

To determine that question, we need to zoom in a bit:

View attachment 20692

(Source)

Hundreds of deaths per annum in the US is a small number per 100,000 - but it's not a small number. And it's VERY significantly more than zero.

Choosing a scale that goes from 0 to 16 to hide an effect that ranges between 0 and 1 is very sneaky; And I suppose we could give the people who do this some credit for their cleverness - if they weren't using it to conceal the easily avoidable deaths of hundreds of children a year.


ETA - See that 'spike' in deaths in 1990? This was due to an epidemic in California, and that event was very closely studied, because it had been thought that Measles was a thing of the past. So why did it happen?

During 1988 through 1990, California experienced its worst measles epidemic in more than a decade, with 16,400 reported cases, 3,390 hospital admissions, and 75 deaths. More than half of the patients were younger than 5 years; the highest incidence was among infants younger than 12 months. The epidemic centered in low-income Hispanic communities in southern and central California. The major cause of the epidemic was low immunization levels among preschool-aged children and young adults. Rates of complications, admission to hospital, and death were surprisingly high. Outbreak control efforts met with indeterminate success. Problems with these efforts included insufficient funding early in the epidemic and disappointing public response to community-based immunization campaigns. The cost of medical care and outbreak control for the epidemic is conservatively estimated at $30.9 million. Unless the level of immunization in preschool-aged children is increased, this type of epidemic will probably recur.

(My bold. Source).

Oh I agree with you entirely. I thought it was clear that I was simply pointing out that skepticalbip was misrepresenting the paragraph he was quoting.

 

[Harry Bosch]

If I were going to pursue the issue I would start with CDC data not post references..

In industrialized nations with good nutrition and heath care what is the risk of death or impairment due to measles and other diseases as a child.

as to the question posed by the show I watched on the impact of multiple simultaneous vaccinations on a still developing immune system, that sounds like a good question to pursue. Unless I am mistaken this is a science forum is it not?

What show is showing that multiple "simultaneous" vaccines are bad for babies? Come on buddy! You've been on this forum long enough to hopefully not believe in quackery that isn't backed up with evidence.

Anyway, babies are exposed to thousands and thousands of antigens per day. The average vaccine has about 150 bacteria and viral components. Having said that, doctors very carefully determine the best schedule to vaccinate babies with the need to balance their protection against diseases vs having too many antigens at once.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Is it statistically more risky? There are reactions to vaccinations.

I watched a show that talked about vaccinations. One of the speakers was looking at the timing of child vaccinations. What she was looking at was the mass attack on a young immune systems by multiple vaccinations simultaneously and over short periods affecting immune system development.

It's a hell of a lot riskier. Finding decent data on vaccine mortality rates is difficult because it's so low, but what I'm seeing seems to say the disease was something like 100x as dangerous as the vaccine and that's looking at when it was caught early. An infection later in life is a lot more dangerous--hence in the pre-vaccine era chicken pox parties made sense.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

If I were going to pursue the issue I would start with CDC data not post references..

In industrialized nations with good nutrition and heath care what is the risk of death or impairment due to measles and other diseases as a child.

as to the question posed by the show I watched on the impact of multiple simultaneous vaccinations on a still developing immune system, that sounds like a good question to pursue. Unless I am mistaken this is a science forum is it not?

It sounds like disinformation. The vaccine deniers don't care about the truth, just their conspiracy theories.

 

[lpetrich]

 Melanie's Marvelous Measles -- a book with this description:

Melanie's Marvelous Measles was written to educate children on the benefits of having measles and how you can heal from them naturally and successfully. Often today, we are being bombarded with messages from vested interests to fear all diseases in order for someone to sell some potion or vaccine, when, in fact, history shows that in industrialized countries, these diseases are quite benign and, according to natural health sources, beneficial to the body.

Some people have constructed satirical versions of that title. I myself have composed the likes of "Betty Paul's Beautiful and Placid Bubonic Plague" and "Eb's Ebullient Ebola". Here are some previous threads that mention some of these satire names:
The role of the media in the measles outbreak
Melanie's Marvelous Measles Is A Book For Children That You Can Buy

 

[Worldtraveller]

Thanks to vaccinations, the death rate from measles in the U.S. has declined precipitously. Considering that in the middle of the twentieth century childhood measles was quite common then there were many thousands of children dying from this disease (13.3 per 100,000). Today measles is rare enough that it becomes a newsworthy event when there is a measles outbreak.

I can't help but notice that the quote you provide does not support your assertions. Mortality rate of 13.3 per 100,000 was at the beginning of the twentieth century, and by mid twentieth century (1963) the mortality rate had fallen to 0.2 per 100,000. That's all pre vaccine.

Graphic from the same article you reference:

View attachment 20691

Sanitation can only take you so far, though. We got the mortality rate down pretty well, but you're still looking at several hundred deaths/year.

After the introduction of the vaccine, that dropped to double digits most years. It nearly reached the status of 'eradicated' in the US by the 80s.

https://www.cdc.gov/measles/about/history.html

 

[Angry Floof]

For 2019, the U.S. has just passed all of 2018 in measles cases.

But no one is surprised by this.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Thanks to vaccinations, the death rate from measles in the U.S. has declined precipitously. Considering that in the middle of the twentieth century childhood measles was quite common then there were many thousands of children dying from this disease (13.3 per 100,000). Today measles is rare enough that it becomes a newsworthy event when there is a measles outbreak.

I can't help but notice that the quote you provide does not support your assertions. Mortality rate of 13.3 per 100,000 was at the beginning of the twentieth century, and by mid twentieth century (1963) the mortality rate had fallen to 0.2 per 100,000. That's all pre vaccine.

Graphic from the same article you reference:

View attachment 20691

Sanitation can only take you so far, though. We got the mortality rate down pretty well, but you're still looking at several hundred deaths/year.

After the introduction of the vaccine, that dropped to double digits most years. It nearly reached the status of 'eradicated' in the US by the 80s.

https://www.cdc.gov/measles/about/history.html

Thames was technically correct. The response was noting that skepbip stated a 13.3 / 100,000 death rate mid century.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Is it statistically more risky? There are reactions to vaccinations.

I watched a show that talked about vaccinations. One of the speakers was looking at the timing of child vaccinations. What she was looking at was the mass attack on a young immune systems by multiple vaccinations simultaneously and over short periods affecting immune system development.

I think this sounds plausible for about a couple of moments. It works until one realizes that an infant has an immune system that was exposed to just about nothing. Which means it is getting bombarded daily by bacteria and viruses. Put toddlers in day care, and they'll be sick often.