So Vitamin A caused this?
Nice try. Vaccination worked; anyone who denies it has trouble with facts.
Posted on 02/09/2015 11:01:01 AM PST by jazusamo
The current controversy over whether parents should be forced to have their children vaccinated for measles is one of the painful signs of our times. Measles was virtually wiped out in the United States, years ago. Why the resurgence of this disease now?
The short answer is that false claims, based on other false claims, led many parents to stop getting their children vaccinated against measles.
The key false claim was that the vaccine for measles caused an increase in autism. This claim was made in 1998 by a doctor writing in a distinguished British medical journal, so it is understandable that many parents took it seriously, and did not want to run the risk of having their child become autistic.
Fortunately, others took the claim seriously in a very different sense. They did massive studies involving half a million children in Denmark and two million children in Sweden. These studies showed that there was no higher incidence of autism among children who had been vaccinated than among children who had not been vaccinated.
Incidentally, the "evidence" on which the original claim that vaccines caused autism was based was just 12 children. But the campaign to convince the public was a masterpiece of propaganda.
The story line was that pharmaceutical companies who produced the vaccine were callously risking and sacrificing helpless children in pursuit of profit. This is the kind of dramatic stuff the media love. It never seemed to occur to the media that lawyers who were suing pharmaceutical companies had a vested interest in this story line that the media fed on to the public.
(Excerpt) Read more at creators.com ...
You’re trying to scare me into thinking measles is a deadly disease because of a death in 1962?
Because it’s not a deadly disease in the US.
10 deaths in 15 years makes it not a deadly disease.
...by attempting to educate her on how to do simple fact-checking, I was proving that I'm part of the conspiracy.
Anti-vaxers remind me very much of 9/11 Truthers. I remember conversations I had with seemingly normal people in the mid and late-2000s who were convinced that the government put bombs in the WTC.
No amount of evidence would convince them, and you would see the same talking points emerge from different people, all copied from obscure conspiracy blogs.
There are similar tactics here, as I had an exchange with an anti-vaxer earlier this week on a Christie/Paul thread that lasted for days, and his only source of information seemed to be the Age of Autism site, and he kept repeating easily debunked points, including the Italian court decisions and Wakefield's "vindication".
Never once did he admit that he was wrong, or ever admit that he had misread data, even when I cut and pasted it and explained his errors. The last resort to explain things would have been finger puppets, but I don't even think that would have worked.
Roald Dahl's account about his daughter was supposed to make you realize that when children die of measles, there is a real human cost. Parents are devastated. Roald Dahl suffered for the rest of his life over losing his daughter. Apparently, you don't have a shred of empathy--no matter how many children die of preventable diseases, you are indifferent to the pain this causes their families.
You are supposed to be scared by the fact that measles kills 400 children every day, 145,000 children per year. You are supposed to be scared by the fact that in countries with good health care systems, measles kills 1-3 out of every thousand children who get it, that measles can cause permanent brain damage and can kill unborn babies. In countries with weak health care systems, the toll is even higher. In addition to the immediate consequences of disease, measles can hide in the body for years, to reappear and kill years later. You are supposed to realize that these things can really happen to you and your kids.
Given your indifference towards parents who lose children to preventable diseases, I am not surprised that you could not care less about the danger your child is to other children who are too young to be vaccinated, or to people with faulty immune systems.
Oh, and that's really cute, linking to some conspiracy nut story. Yep, there is some huge hidden conspiracy of people armed with facts about medicine, jumping out from under bridges to post those facts and try to educate people (even those who are incapable of learning). You know what? There is no conspiracy. People like me are fully open about the fact that we want to counter quackery with actual scientific facts determined through rigorous research.
I strongly suspect that their brains are miswired. Imaging studies of brains of psychopaths have found that in some of them, the empathy circuits are actually misrouted to the pleasure centers of their brains, so that when they see pain and suffering, they enjoy the experience instead of reacting sympathetically like most people.
I would not be surprised at all if studies revealed the same kind of miswiring in the brains of conspiracy theorists. This would be regardless of the nature of the conspiracy--there is an underlying similarity between people who believe that vaccines are a giant plot by the government to adulterate your body, and those who believe the moon landing is a hoax, that 9/11 was done by the government, etc. Their logic centers are defective.
Measles kills 140,000 kids a year around the world, largely in pockets where people aren't vaccinated.
In addition to that, even though you're more likely than not to survive measles (not reassuring odds to me when it comes to my kids), there are serious symptoms that can cause permanent damage, like brain swelling and hearing loss.
The death rate in general is higher in areas where there is no water, no shelter, no food.
I’m surprised that didn’t occur to you -
The vaccination can also cause encephalitis, death, joint issues, and a myriad of other problems.
Informed consent is the key - the ability for a person to say “thank you but no” or “not now”
How many in the US is it killing every day?
Oh that’s right it’s not.
I know there’s a morbid gleefulness in some of you hoping that when it finally happens, that will show us.
But the fact is we have over 320 million people in this country - 100+ cases of the measles is just not epidemic and a death march waiting to happen.
And no vaccinations. Did you intentionally leave that off of your list?
There used to be a half million measles cases a year before the vaccine in the early 60s, and in the late 50s measles led to more deaths than polio. Your statement that it is "not deadly" is simply false.
The side effects are rare and the vaccine is as safe as any medical treatment out there to prevent highly infectious diseases.
I'm not sure why you think that you have the right to infect other people with serious but preventable illnesses, but for some reason you're under the false impression that measles is similar to chicken pox.
It's much more serious, and you should stop reading anti-vaxer blogs that are lying to you and look at the medical evidence.
Oh that’s right it’s not.
It's not killing people because we undertook a massive vaccination initiative to wipe it out.
In the early 50s there were between 500,000 and 800,000 cases a year, with any where from 400 to 700 deaths annually. By the early 80s, after 20s years of vaccinations, there were essentially none.
Do you seriously think measles was largely eradicated because of better access to water, food, and shelter?
Don’t forget the Vitamin A that doctor’s had already been giving people.
If the vaccination worked like it’s said to work the 5% of the population that doesn’t shouldn’t impact the 95% who vaccinate.
So Vitamin A caused this?
Nice try. Vaccination worked; anyone who denies it has trouble with facts.
And infants and the elderly, people with compromised immune systems?
Just screw 'em, right?
Buck up and take some Vitamin A, just like they do in the third world:
We can add Luddite to anti-vaxer comparisons.
How many deaths again due to measles in the last 10 years in the US -
Oh here, let me a help a fear monger out -
“From 1985 through 1992, diarrhea was reported in 8% of measles cases, making this the most commonly reported complication of measles. Otitis media was reported in 7% of cases and occurs almost exclusively in children. Pneumonia (in 6% of reported cases) may be viral or superimposed bacterial, and is the most common cause of death.
Acute encephalitis occurs in approximately 0.1% of reported cases. Onset generally occurs 6 days after rash onset (range 1–15 days) and is characterized by fever, headache, vomiting, stiff neck, meningeal irritation, drowsiness, convulsions, and coma. Cerebrospinal fluid shows pleocytosis and elevated protein. The case-fatality rate is approximately 15%. Some form of residual neurologic damage occurs in as many as 25% of cases. Seizures (with or without fever) are reported in 0.6%–0.7% of cases.
Death from measles was reported in approximately 0.2% of the cases in the United States from 1985 through 1992. As with other complications of measles, the risk of death is higher among young children and adults. Pneumonia accounts for about 60% of deaths. The most common causes of death are pneumonia in children and acute encephalitis in adults. Since 1995, an average of 1 measles-related death per year has been reported.”
http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/pubs/pinkbook/meas.html
Most of the elderly have had measles (and survived) and have life long immunity.
I don’t see how many of the 20 deaths in the last almost 20 years were due to infants who caught the wild measles strain.
What about the death rates?
And the fact that measles were already declining?
or did that not fit into your graph?
With a cap life on immunity - I suspect we’ll be seeing more and more outbreaks, not because of the unvaccinated, but because of the vaccination not providing life long immunity.
How many deaths again due to measles in the last 10 years in the US -
Less than 10 as far as I can tell. Again, vaccination works.
Oh here, let me a help a fear monger out -
It's not fear mongering to point out when someone is wrong.
To say that an infectious illness, that kills 1 in 500 people who catch it, is "not deadly" is false. It is not "fear-mongering" to call out clearly wrong information, and on the contrary, spreading false alarm about vaccinations could arguably be called "fear-mongering".
The incidence of adverse reaction resulting in death from the MMR vaccine is less than 1 in 1 million, so the odds are clearly on the side of vaccination, much like the odds are clearly on the side that the sun will come up tomorrow.
But adverse reactions do in fact happen -
Measles is not a deadly disease— pneumonia is what typically kills someone.
You're absolutely right, even though much of the anti-vax push is coming from the anti-pharma, all natural left. The media ignores that corner of the anti-vax market completely.
I have a friend who lives in San Fran (he's a hippy, but my 35 year campaign to fix him is progressing) told me that the un-vaccinated are militant about it out there, and they're all coming at it from the left.
Deadly reactions from the MMR shot are so rare as to be 1 case in millions of doses.
Measles is not a deadly disease— pneumonia is what typically kills someone.
Your own cited source puts the death rate of 1 in 500 infections. Coupled with the fact that it kills 150,000 people a year globally, calling it "not a deadly disease" is a semantic absurdity.
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