There are a LOT of potential explanations. One which has been put forth by serious researchers, is that many children in developed countries are growing up in unnaturally sterile environments, with homes constantly being cleaned, Lysol’d, vacuumed with vacuum cleaners equipped with HEPA filters, spending little time outside interacting with bugs and bird poop, and thus not getting a normal range and quantity of exposures to properly develop their immune systems (this is consistent with what’s been demonstrated with more ordinary allergies, that children growing up on farms are far less likely to be allergic to things like dogs/cats/pollen).
The key is the correlation to developed countries, where there’s a whole range of synthetic chemicals that people are exposed to on a daily basis. The chemicals emanating from foam rubber furniture cushions and “rubber” backed rugs, adhesives used in plywood and pressboard products, fiberglass used in insulation, and the idiotic fire retardant chemicals that are all over upholstery fabric and children pajamas. Another chemical of unknown effects was spotted recently — can’t recall what it was, but it’s formed by chlorinated water and heat, and they found elevated levels in the blood of people who’d recently taken a shower! Compulsive showering is a very modern Western concept (and still not nearly as frequent in Europe as in the US. And then there are all the lawn chemicals and household cleaning products and home/garden pesticides. There are just so MANY things that could be causing this, that trying to blame vaccines is really absurd. One big part of the puzzle may simply be that kids who were genetically predisposed to this used to die long before reaching reproductive age (and still do in underdeveloped countries), and thus not pass on the genes for it. Now they’re all running around with epi-pens and being helicoptered to the hospital.
And wait til you come down with shingles to decide that it’s not worth vaccinating against chicken pox. For some people it never fully goes away. For my father, it took several months and also involved a trip to the emergency room when a doctor thought his symptoms sounded like a heart attack. An elderly woman who lived next door to my vacation home, and had been doing fine living on her own, ended up having to move into a nursing about 3 years ago due to shingles. The pain remains unmanageable without drugs that impair her balance and reflexes, so she can’t live on her own anymore. Keeping her in a nursing home for what may well turn out to be 10 years or more, with not only ruin her quality of life, but cost several hundred thousand dollars.
Of course the chemicals we live with are another potential explanation. The job, though, of the medical research community is to do wide-ranging double-blind studies and find out.
From everything I’ve seen, the anti-vaccine people are the ones saying this is a hypothesis that should be studied, while some of the folks on the other side are the ones saying that further research on the link would be “counterproductive.” There goes the scientific method out the window.
Do the study. If there’s no link, fine, we’ll find that out.
Sounds like homeopathy! And not exactly hard science, is what you describe.
Yeah, I've heard this one. Seems pretty thin to me. I'd like to see the data from the randomized controlled trials. Sounds a lot like an establishment refusing to critically examine the vaccination industry.
Why do you suppose no one believes the government? Because they're full of shit.