Going by the name of "Brian Deer" (oh, that's so funny I nearly shit), my poster is claiming a load of the usual bollocks that gets spouted by the anti-vaxers.
I'll summarise the main points, and try and explain to him where he's either missed the point, cherry picking data, or just lying.
1. Measles is not dangerous, as there have only been three deaths from it [in the UK] in the last eighteen years.
Hmm. Has it occurred to you, "Brian", that there have only been 3 deaths from measles in 18 years primarily because we've been vaccinating? Are you also aware that, according to World Health Organisation figures, in 2008 there were 164 000 measles deaths globally – nearly 450 deaths every day or 18 deaths every hour. 450 preventable deaths a day. Think on that one, you callous bastard.
This isn't just about the worried well refusing to vaccinate in this country, where there are generally excellent health facilities for those who do fall sick, and a high level of herd immunity. This is about the morons who preach the evils of vaccination worldwide, and would like to stop vaccination programs in India, aub-Saharan Africa, and other places with less than ideal medical infrastructures.
In the UK and the US, prior to his beloved 18 year period, there were hundreds of thousands of cases of measles, many of them fatal in the 1950s and 60s.
Click for larger version.
Given that vaccination has massively reduced the incidence of measles (to the point that in the UK, until recently, it was no longer endemic), and standards of medical care are constantly improving, it's no surprise that there have been so few deaths from measles in the last 18 years.
That, however, is a situation that my commenter would dearly love to see reversed.
2. Travelling by car is more dangerous than measles - why am I bothering arguing against the anti-vaxers?
Yes, there are more deaths on the road every year (in the UK) than there are from measles. I'll grant you that. However, there isn't a small but vocal group of fucking morons all over the internet trying to ban airbags, seatbelts and crumple zones in cars, and lying about it to vulnerable groups and individuals on the basis that they think they might be dangerous, and / or they have a massive vested interest in keeping their made up "controversy" going. If there was, I'd be pointing out their bloody idiocy as well. Also - see the point about 450 preventable deaths per day.
3. "I don't vaccinate. As i said in a previous post, I lie awake at night fearing rare cancers in the young, diabetes, asthma, arthritis, alzheimer's, Multiple Sclerosis, diabetes T1, autism. These are the increasing modern diseases, that no-one knows what the cause is. I also feel safer. "
This isn't an argument. What you mean is you've listened to a load of anti-vaccine liars, and have had a huge seed of doubt planted in your head. You don't have enough critical thinking faculties to see that there is no good evidence to suggest that any of these conditions are related to vaccines, and no statistical correlation either. None whatsoever.
4. "I cant help it if your choice to vaccinate has a positive externality for my child, at 0 risk to my child. But when you really think about it, you can CALL me scientifically iiliterate , you can call me an idiot, you can show me your degrees in science, just keep vaccinating :)"
This just translates as "I'm a selfish cunt and I know it, la la la, I'm not listening!!!"
5. "Professional research loses credibility with me, if it is sponsored by the very people who sell that vaccine. Selective funding can affect professional research results."
Or; "I'm a paranoid, credulous conspiracy theorist."
6. "Can you tell me if the increased vaccine load, or a component of the vaccine increases the risk of any of these diseases [Rare tumours in the young, asthma, diabeties type 1, Arthritis, MS , autism, nervous system tumours] 20 years after the injection? No? "
Well, idiot boy, given that all the evidence suggests that vaccines do not increase the danger of these conditions, why don't you tell me why you think it does. The onus is on you to show some plausible mechanism for it, or some statistical correlation. Come back when you can.
"Brian" has clearly swallowed the anti-vax bleatings of the likes of JABS without applying any actual thought. One of the main themes running through his slew of comments is that vaccination is more dangerous than measles. Let me run a few figures past you, shall I Brian?
Risk / Benefit analysis of vaccination vs measles (taken from a recent Guardian CiF thread, compiled by DeeTee from (I understand) HPA stats):
If one million kids are given vaccine (MMR):
1000 will have a febrile convulsion.
30 will get thrombocytopenia.
10 will get a severe allergic reaction.
1 will get encephalitis (ADEM).
If one million kids get measles (in Europe, in the 21st century):
200 will die.
100,000 will be ill enough to need hospitalisation.
90,000 will get otitis media.
80,000 will get gastroenteritis.
50,000 will get primary viral or secondary bacterial pneumonia.
5000 will have a febrile convulsion.
1000 will get encephalitis (ADEM or SSPE), 100 of whom will die and 2-300 will have residual brain damage.
1000 will get various other problems such as hepatitis, myocarditis, thrombocytopenia or miscarriage if caught in pregnancy.
Now - wanna rethink?
20 comments:
Dear Brian Deer
You are full of such hot air,"Never have unvaccinated people been compared to vaccinated people in a straight study" Its been done to death in study after study demonstrating the benefits of vaccination. Talking of crocks of shit I see that you're still clinging to Andrew Wakefield's nonsense like a comfort blanket, why did he totally ignore Chadwick's data showing his immunological tests for measles were false positives,why did Chadwick tell Wakefield to remove his name from the author list?? There's plenty of studies showing the benefit of vaccination try looking at the introduction of meningococcal C vaccination in the Canadian provinces, varied timeline, guess what incidence went down in the provinces introducing vaccination. Look at the elimination of polio in Europe after WWII, guess what it follows country by country as the vaccine was introduced.
There's not a hope in hell that your cockeyed study would get past an ethical committee.
"1963 to the healthy, and most importantly was getting less serious each year as you can see in 1976" you're cherry picking again John/Clifford whoever, look at the HPA statistics. c 50-100 deaths per year in the UK before the introduction of measles vaccine.
"Why don’t you look into what could be causing the auto-immune diseases of today to increase?" So what's the theory John the vaccine attenuated strains induce autoimmunity but the virulent WT strains didn't, huuum care to give some evidence??
"autism/antivaccine/pro-disease groups"nice and appropriate mis-type John, or was it deliberate?
"It’s easy to dismiss us as ignorant, stupid or a twat"
Yep, sure is. That's because you are. All three. Well done.
"There has never been any research done on whether unvaccinated people have more incidences of these diseases than vaccinated people."
Fairly sure there has "Brian" but, for the sake of argument, let's say there hasn't. That would leave you with
a. no plausible theoretical explanation of a mechanism by which vaccination causes/raises the risk of autism/anything else
AND
b. no evidence of statistical correlation between autism/etc and vaccination
Now, surely mate, even a total moron such as youself can see the desirability of having at least one of the above if you're going to argue/imply that a causal link exists?
As far as I'm aware, no research has been done on the link between the incidence of the ebola virus and cycling. Now, bearing in mind the following FACTS:
a. Ebola is almost always fatal and poses a particularly serious risk to CHILDREN
b. Many people who have died as a result of contracting ebola were known cyclists
c. Cycling is extremely popular amongst CHILDREN
shouldn't you be warning concerned parents about the possible dangers of allowing their children to cycle? I mean, NO RESEARCH WHATSOEVER has been done in this area, so how can we know what the risks REALLY are? Maybe the powerful cycling manufacturers' lobby is suppressing evidence. Now, I know I've got absolutely fuck all evidence to show that they are, but nobody has proved that they aren't and it's just the kind of thing the bastards MIGHT do, given half a chance .....
Brian, you really are an ignoramus. Failure to immunize against potentially dangerous diseases is not about being precautious; it is best summed up as selfish stupidity. The attitude that it’s alright, my children won’t be unduly harmed if they catch one of these diseases has got to be one of the most selfish, stupid and downright ignorant attitudes I have ever met.
Have you (or any of the people you listen to on this topic) ever considered that your failure to vaccinate is putting vulnerable children who can’t be vaccinated for medical reasons at risk of major health problems or even death?
Have you ever heard of the Shining Mountain Waldorf School in Boulder Colorado? It is a shining example of middle class stupidity. The childhood vaccination rate at this school is about 50%. You need over 95% to create herd immunity. Shining Mountain has single handedly re-introduced whooping cough as a major childhood illness into the Boulder region. Older children and adults survive whooping cough – although they can be sick for a long time. But whooping cough kills young babies.
The Boulder region now has an average of 2 deaths from whooping cough per year, when once it had none. Two totally preventable deaths as a result of the sort of selfish stupidity you advocate.
So Brian dear, you have outed yourself as a complete tosser. You don’t care about anybody but yourself. You are quite happy to have other people take small risks to help you, but are totally incapable of taking the smallest risk to help anyone else. You just couldn’t give a shit if someone else’s child were to die because of the actions you take and promote on the internet.
So not vaccinating against measles is OK, because only 10 children with health problems died each year in the UK in the 1960s? Perhaps you would like to take your reasoning to the mothers of those children? “Sorry, but your baby had to die because I didn’t want to take a miniscule risk.” Wonder how that would go down, particularly in light of the fact that none of those children would have died of measles if the population had been adequately vaccinated.
How do you think the mother of one of those children might feel knowing we have available medicines that could protect their child from a dangerous and potentially life-threatening disease and there are morons like you out there refusing to help and encouraging others to be just as selfish and stupid? It must be interesting living with a world view where you don’t give a shit about anyone else
Well "Brian", now that "flu has killed 254 people since September" - Daily Mirror, 21/1/2011
(http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/top-stories/2011/01/21/flu-death-toll-rises-but-new-cases-ease-off-115875-22863948/) - how do you feel about flu vaccines now? (Given that there are no credible or confirmed reports of deaths or serious long term vaccine injury)
Or have you fucked off for good?
Becky allow me to answer that last question.
1) The Flu vaccine has on average 1% effectiveness against getting the flu vs. non-vaccination. It has ZERO effectiveness against transmission (herd immunity argument flushes down the toiler).
You can find this data on PubMed, it's based on a study done by the Cochrane Library comparing 50 flu reports, 40 of which had over 70,000 people and 15 of which were done by the manufacturers of the vaccines, which are always the friendliest of reports. Even with all this, they still couldn't find efficacy more than 1% on average. They said even if they guessed all the strains correctly it would only jump to 3 or 4%. Why did x amount more people die in one year? Because the flu strains change every year and some are more virulent than others.
PubMed - http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20614424
Original Document - http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/o/cochrane/clsysrev/articles/CD001269/frame.html
As for the graph you posted regarding measles and the vaccine by year, yes cases were reported less. However what you've cleverly done is to present that as somehow related to the number of deaths. When you add in the deaths you get a much different story.
http://www.hpa.org.uk/web/HPAweb&HPAwebStandard/HPAweb_C/1195733756107
Over 95% of measles-related deaths were eradicated thanks to changes in sanitation and refrigeration. Our health improved in all aspects. The remaining deaths are usually in people with pre-existing immuno-deficiency diseases like Leukemia and other cancers.
Is it worth injecting several known carcinogens and/or neurotoxins to protect against a disease that is generally "mild" for healthy people?
Measles has historically been a common childhood disease with rare complications. Mass vaccination has resulted in a dramatic decline in measles incidence, but outbreaks now occur in older populations and in infants born to women whose immunity from vaccination has deteriorated. IE - vaccination doesn't provide the same immunity that catching measles normally provides and thus babies aren't as well protected by their mother's milk.
I just found this blog and have been having a chuckle - thanks Becky.
If I may answer an old comment on an old post, Bill Laswell demonstrates that he doesn't understand what "efficacy" means when applied to vaccines. The Cochrane review he links to found that if the vaccine was well matched to the circulating virus the incidence of influenza was reduced by 73%, and if it wasn't well matched the incidence was reduced by 44%. If 2% of the unvaccinated population get influenza, and 1% of the vaccinated population get it, that's 50% efficacy, not 1%.
As for measles, that tired old argument that mortality had declined before vaccination was introduced, again? Why is it OK for dozens of children to die of a disease every year just because hundreds used to die 100 years ago? We have a safe and effective vaccine that would completely eradicate the disease in a few years if everyone was vaccinated.
The answer is that it's perfectly OK for dozens of children to die because Laswell and his fucking friends are scared of vaccines because they don't understand them - and in some cases because they make a shedload of money flogging / promoting useless "treatments" for autism - which they need to blame on something. Simple.
Pro-disease bastards.
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