Does the average HN reader get vaccinations? How about for their children? I'm interested in peoples' critical thought, since we as a loose community often take an investigative/contrarian approach to assumed best practices. It seems many of us are acutely aware of herd mentality, collusion and corruption when it comes to the combination of tech subjects, the media and government/societal norms.
Personally, I am for vaccination. I'm way over vaccinated due to trips to third world countries -- sometimes I would get 6 shots over 2 days. However the spacing for vaccinations in infants seems rushed, and the ingredients are something I wouldn't let my kid touch or eat. (kind of like how you wouldn't feed your kid honey until after they're one) I recently told our doctor we wanted an ingredient list of the vaccines they were planning to administer, so we could attempt to understand, before following their schedule in ignorance. I definitely don't want my kid to have the diseases our grand parents grew up with, and that means vaccinating.
I'm wondering if a doctor would balk at signing a document of liability for {x} resulting from vaccination. If she wouldn't put her career behind her belief, should I believe her?
Does herd immunity require herd mentality? Can one investigate, or at least try to be diligent without being vilified?
>I'm wondering if a doctor would balk at signing a document of liability for {x} resulting from vaccination. If she wouldn't put her career behind her belief, should I believe her?
For one, there is a law in the US that removes vaccination liability from doctors.
A bigger problem with your suggestion is problematic math behind it - if vaccines killed one person for every ten saved it would still be worthwhile, but your suggestion would quickly ensure no doctors ever willing to give any vaccines to anyone, ensuring higher death rate among you and your relatives. The actual incident rate is much smaller - for example between 3000 and 49000 people die of flu each year, and only about a 100 people die of vaccine complications (most of them of egg allergy, totally preventable if treated right away).
It's precisely due such poor understanding of statistics is why there are large groups if people opposed to vaccination - they fixate on a smaller probability negative outcome in the immediate future and ignore large probability negative outcome three months down the road.
I would balk at anything that, whether or not a patient could prove causality would cost me thousands of dollars in legal bills and tie up hours of my time I could better be doing other things.
I don't think any professional can be blamed for not wanting to tie liability to client whimsey.
I find the fact that people die of a treatable side-effect resulting from a voluntary medical treatment to be particularly terrible.
>It's precisely due such poor understanding of statistics is why there are large groups if people opposed to vaccination - they fixate on a smaller probability negative outcome in the immediate future and ignore large probability negative outcome three months down the road.
No, the probability of death or injury from all diseases (for people in the US) is small. It may be relatively large compared to the probability of death or injury from vaccination, but it is still small for each individual.
That small probability is largely because of vaccination. But there's a huge herd effect, so your analysis is correct for the individual, while still badly wrong for society as a whole.
Evidently you're not familiar with moral philosophy, but there is a difference between taking an action that you know will kill random people vs. not taking the action and leaving things to accident.
Also, there is a problem with the hypothetical, since there are other means of reducing disease than vaccination, e.g. aggressive quarantine and disinfection, trending toward telecommuting or smaller school classroom size, etc.
> I'm wondering if a doctor would balk at signing a document of liability for {x} resulting from vaccination. If she wouldn't put her career behind her belief, should I believe her?
Suppose a doctor vaccinates 20 kids a week, for 50 weeks of the year (1000 kids per year). Suppose each vaccination has an average of 3 different vaccines (i.e. against 3 different diseases). Suppose the average vaccine has a 1/10k chance of serious complication. So over the course of a year the doctor gives about 3000 vaccines each year with a 1/10k chance of serious complication. Suppose a single serious complication risks their career. This means the average doctor is risking their career over 1 incident just over every 3 years. I personally prefer a family physician with more than 3.3 years of experience.
Meanwhile over those 3 years 9000 cases of disease were eliminated. Sure your kid may mean everything to you (mine sure does) but having a doctor put their career on the line for something that only has a probability of success is silly considering how many times they roll the dice in their career.
Can you explain why you think the vaccinations for infants "seems rushed"? What's the basis for that?
As for the ingredients, that goes for most medicine. Medicine is often stuff you wouldn't want to be eating or touching routinely, but that's because it's for non-routine use. I wouldn't give my kid a big bottle of acetaminophen to chow down on, but I will give some of it to her when it's medically indicated.
As for signing a document of liability, would you sign one if you thought that the procedure was generally safe, but there was a one-in-a-million chance that, through no fault of your own, the procedure could go wrong and leave you bankrupt because of what you signed?
I wasn't the commenter, but as to vaccines being 'rushed', I'd imagine that most people feel a Hep vaccine for a 1 day old is probably not necessary due to the exposure a newborn simply wouldn't have to the virus. The CDC lists the common ways it is spread, and none are likely other than contracting from the mother (who can be tested before birth).
How likely are any of these events for a newborn? Would waiting a week, a month, etc put an infant at risk?
From CDC site:
"Babies and children can get hepatitis B in the following ways:
At birth from their infected mother.
From bites from an infected person.
By touching open cuts or sores of an infected person.
Through sharing toothbrushes or other personal items used by an infected person.
From food that was chewed (for a baby) by an infected person.
From ear piercing needles that were not cleaned well."
Is testing the mother before birth so much better than simply vaccinating the baby, especially since blood transfer from other people is not completely out of the question anyway?
If you wait a week, that's a week-long window for infection. It's small, certainly, but what's the gain? Is there any advantage to waiting?
I was simply stating one example of what is often considered a rushed vaccine, again due to exposure levels for infants. Using your logic, it seems we could vaccinate all babies on day one with every single vaccine available, even for diseases that are rarely found in the country, as the is some small chance a one day old could have exposure.
The gain comes when the safety of vaccinations comes up into question. The CDC doesn't advocate giving every available vaccine on day one, in a single massive cocktail form, for this very reason. This would be the cheapest and most efficient way to vaccinate (all at once, one shot for all vaccines), but obviously that is not how it is done due to safety of the newborn.
By my logic, we'd end up doing something completely sensible that helps protect infants from disease? How terrible.
Your reasoning seems to boil down to anti-vaccination people thinking it's worse, and this is some small concession to them. Which is essentially saying, it's rushed because I say it's rushed.
I may be misinterpreting your comment, but you aren't suggesting we should give every available vaccine at the same time to a newborn, or are you? That practice isn't condoned by the CDC and thinking that might be worse (due to safety of the recipient) isn't a concession to anyone. The CDC isn't advocating for that, because they surely would have some safety concerns.
There are a number of vaccines to give, and if there were no concerns about safety they could all be given at birth. However, there obviously are concerns by manufacturers and the CDC (and of course elsewhere) so the CDC created a schedule. People that question the schedule often question the Hep first, based on the incredibly small chance an infant would come into contact with the virus.
Part of the reasoning behind the schedule being the way it is relates to doctor visits. The CDC wants children vaccinated, so accelerating the schedule and giving multiple vaccinations at once isn't due to fear of exposure at certain ages as much as the logic of "while you're here, let's take care of these vaccines as well." Kind of like the reasoning behind topping off your fluids during a car's scheduled maintenance. No need to bring the car in when you are more likely to run dry on fluids, we'll just fill you up while you're here.
Part of the CDC's concern is making sure kids are vaccinated, so the more vaccinations at once mentality makes sense to increase the likelihood of vaccination. Parents would surely be less likely to visit a doctor 15 times in a year than say 2-3 or less.
The link below shows the number of vaccines recommended in the first 6 years. Bundling them and accelerating the schedule helps guarantee higher vaccination rates, but can complicate matters when safety of vaccines is harder to test and compare in a multitude of combinations.
You have to decide whether or not the CDC is reliable. If they are, then you can use their schedule as evidence that it's a bad idea to give all vaccines immediately, but you must also accept that giving the Hep B vaccine at birth is safe and not "rushed". If they are not reliable, then you need reasons for why giving vaccines at birth may be unsafe besides the CDC saying so.
Agreed. But I think part if this is necessity based. When going overseas you are often given shots for things that are less likely found in the US. It's not impossible to catch those diseases in the US, but the costs or risks of vaccinating the entire US population prevents us from doing that.
The vaccine court has paid out individuals for vaccine injury. The results of the court are generally not widely publicized, but defining safe is somewhat key to these points.
Well, nothing is going to be 100% safe. If vaccines do more good than harm, then they should be used. A court that awards damages to those who got unlucky is a good way to try to even it out a bit.
I really would like to know what, if any, reasons there are to delay vaccines and why one might consider any given schedule to be "rushed". But so far I only get handwaving.
On the day you are born, we know the least about you. Maybe you have a pre-existing condition that will be revealed in weeks to come. One of the few known vaccine court payouts went to a young girl named Hannah Poling, who had a mitochondrial disorder, and there are likely others with the same condition. Now that we know that a certain mitochondrial disorder may make a child more apt to vaccine injury, testing could prevent future injury.
This is only one specific case, but the point is that the more we know about a person, the more likely we are to make informed decisions about their safety and health.
Only some kids are allergic to peanuts, but we don't give kids peanuts until they are two or so. We know more about them at two, and they are less vulnerable.
In my opinion, what is driving the vaccine schedule is a combination of things based on various motives. One motive is to help children. Another motive is profit, and yet another is politically driven. The connection between the vaccine makers, politicians, and the CDC is easy to find ( former CDC employees tend to go pharma), and you don't need to be a conspiracy theorist to at least understand where there could be some possibility of priorities being crossed.
I am pretty lazy about keeping up with my own. I tend to keep up with Tetanus (tdap?) because I like to be outside (Tetanus), and I have a little one (Pertussis). I never take flu shots[1]. I used to travel, and like you, I'd usually go get vaccinated for any weird/horrible diseases common to regions I planned to visit.
My kids? We're cautious. Never more than one at a time. Didn't bother with Rotavirus (I suspect we paid for that). No Hep-B at birth. Oldest has had the MMR. So far the only out of the ordinary observation was with our youngest who had a horrible cough after receiving the DTaP. Would refuse Gardasil.
> I recently told our doctor we wanted an ingredient list of the vaccines they were planning to administer, so we could attempt to understand, before following their schedule in ignorance.
It is a shame that asking simple questions like that can get you labeled as a crank in some circles. Fortunately, most of that is published by the CDC, and other places. Childhood vaccination schedule for the convenience of anyone who is curious. http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/schedules/hcp/child-adolescent.h...
>I'm wondering if a doctor would balk at signing a document of liability
I can't imagine any doctor would sign any type of document for liability. There is a special court that has heard vaccine injury claims (http://www.nvic.org/injury-compensation.aspx) for almost 30 years in the US, so expecting an individual doctor to be held to a standard of liability that could be perceived as above the
liability for the vaccine manufacturer is probably unlikely.
> I'm wondering if a doctor would balk at signing a document of liability for {x} resulting from vaccination. If she wouldn't put her career behind her belief, should I believe her?
I'm wondering if a programmer would balk at signing a document of liability for {x} resulting from their code submitted on a tight deadline. If they wouldn't put their career behind the belief in their code, should I believe them?
... adding "tight deadline" imbalances this equation a bit. In a place where a vaccine will stop rampant spreading of a virus, then you could consider it a tight deadline - though in a place where it's mostly under control, the comparison doesn't hold as apples to apples.
How much time do you think doctors have to spend with each patient, and would you consider that a tight deadline?
The time pressure on programmers due to business needs limits the amount of time they get to spend with their code, much like the time pressure on doctors due to business needs limits the amount of time they get to spend with each patient, researching the latest anti-vax theories, etc.
When you ask how much time doctors 'have' to spend with each patient, I assume you are using have as in 'how much time do they possess' and not 'are required to spend'. Assuming you are using the former (mainly because there does not seem to be a mandated minimum), doctors have as much time as they want to spend with each patient. The problem is that it's less profitable to spend more than a few minutes, and it's even more profitable to pass off the responsibility of seeing patients to those that lack a doctor's credential (who earn less).
The tight deadline you refer to is entirely self-imposed due to profit models.
You're not diagnosing a patient for vaccines, that's really the point of them being given out to everyone - it's efficient, and at the cost of side-effects for those who might be more sensitive to them (whatever that means, and however that displays itself as).
The amount of time a doctor takes in a patient consultation has zero effect on the probability of vaccine injury (also, vaccinations are typically administered by nurses).
Is there a source for that? Someone in this thread mentioned things like egg allergies as a source for vaccine complications, and it isn't hard to imagine that increased consultation time (over no consultation at all) would result in better outcomes and fewer injuries.
Ok. If I had an egg allergy and went to a doctor who simply decided to roll up my sleeve and stick me, I would likely
have an adverse reaction. If the doctor took one minute to speak to me about any allergies, I'd likely not get stuck and have an adverse reaction (and I'd be given an alternate vaccine for those allergic).
Is that pretty clear how a consultation would result in a better outcome and less injuries?
Not the best analogy with the tight deadline, but I understand your stance. If I was asked to bet my career that my code would not kill or disfigure someone, then I'd have to answer based on what I personally believe, and what I trust my code to do based on my education as a software engineer. I could say, "yes this website will not kill you, but this drone software might under extremely rare circumstances."
I think a better question for your doctor is "Do you give these same vaccines to your own children on this same schedule?" The answer is almost certainly yes, and that means more to me than a document of liability, particularly considering the liability would mostly be transferred to the doctor's insurance provider.
I agree. This was the spirit of my original hypothetical question -- to ascertain the sincere belief from the practitioner. I apologize that my idea was so confrontational, when your suggestion does the same thing.
The sum of the studies and education (I assume they are both untainted and unbiased) is expressed in their application to their own kin.
As someone mentioned, this is a gut feeling from someone who is pro-vaccine. It is true that I don't have information -- I'm actively, sincerely seeking information. Would you knock me for that? I understand there are anti-vaccine, conspiracy theorist kooks out there, but I'm not one of them.
I also don't have information saying spreading out the doses over time would be better or worse. What are other countries doing WRT infant vaccine schedules? What are some options that still get my child vaccinated against disease? Are the doses they take 1/20th the amount that I would take, since I'm 20 times their weight? Does scaling doses even work that way? Why didn't I take organic chemistry when I was in college? Does ethyl-mercury metabolize into anything? When the CDC says 'a tiny bit' what does that mean quantitatively? These are just some of the questions I'm asking, so that I don't remain ignorant.
It's no credit to remain ignorant, and it's no credit to be a belligerent fanatic on either side. If I can be bothered to wash my kid's grapes before they eat them, I could at least understand what the doctor is putting in them before following blindly.
It means that some people have a "gut feel", and they believe their gut is more accurate than bazillions statistically validated studies on the proper vaccination schedule.
Your unwillingness to accept that some people want to learn before doing something irreversible is borderline trollish. Having a gut feeling does not imply an immutable opinion, especially after evaluating related facts. Every person has a responsibility to understand the consequences of their actions and in-actions. What you are seeing here is a person being more diligent with his kid than he was with himself.
To some people, it means that they probably don't feel a Hep vaccine is necessary on the date of birth or perhaps even for longer, because the parents will control the infant's environment. If you are taking your baby home, controlling who will touch the baby, what it eats, etc, Hep shouldn't be an issue, and the vaccine at day 1 seems like an unnecessary risk (even at 1000000:1 odds of an adverse reaction, the risk of infection may lower due to a newborn's lifestyle).
That is just one example, but vaccine schedules are impacted by exposure risk, but also by some level of convenience (based on the fact that we don't go to doctors every day, so "let's vaccinate you as much as we can in the few times we'll see you"). If you show up for a well visit and your child is not 100%, do you let the child get the vaccine or do you come back next week/month?
Vaccine safety is easier to test under very strict conditions and single vaccinations, but the topic is complicated by varying levels of child health as well as offering vaccines in combination.
Vaccines come in multiple doses. Some countries space out each dose every other month, others do it every two or three months. It varies. The US schedule is similar but not the same as many countries in the EU.
Big pharma also keeps pushing cocktail shots, multiple vaccinations in one single shot, whereas before you would take multiple visits and each time it would be a separate vaccine.
The body can tolerate millions of antigens being presented to it simultaneously. In fact, it does every day. So do the bodies of children.
This is not some push by the "pharma" bogeyman. It's a push by doctors to reduce the chance that a child fails to complete his or her vaccination series.
If the probability of missing a visit is, say, 0.05, then the probability of missing a shot in a series of 3 is (1 - 0.95^3) ~= 14%, as opposed to 5% if you can actually do it all at once.
Hell, the moment a baby passes through the vaginal canal they're probably exposed to more antigens than the entire vaccine schedule, let alone their first few hours in a hospital.
> Big pharma also keeps pushing cocktail shots, multiple vaccinations in one single shot, whereas before you would take multiple visits and each time it would be a separate vaccine.
OK, so what's their motive? Surely Big Pharma in cahoots with Big Doctor would love lots of visits and lots of separate billable injections?
The real reason is more likely to be that plenty of people only take their kids to the pediatrician once in a while, because they don't have insurance or they work a lot (particularly amongst the poor, where things like transportation can be an issue), so getting them all in in a few combination shots means higher vaccination levels across the board.
"GlaxoSmithKline agreed to plead guilty to criminal charges and pay $3 billion in fines for promoting its best-selling antidepressants for unapproved uses and failing to report safety data about a top diabetes drug, federal prosecutors announced Monday. The agreement also includes civil penalties for improper marketing of a half-dozen other drugs."
"Glaxo chief: Our drugs do not work on most patients
A senior executive with Britain's biggest drugs company has admitted that most prescription medicines do not work on most people who take them. Allen Roses, worldwide vice-president of genetics at GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), said fewer than half of the patients prescribed some of the most expensive drugs actually derived any benefit from them.
It is an open secret within the drugs industry that most of its products are ineffective in most patients but this is the first time that such a senior drugs boss has gone public.
"The vast majority of drugs - more than 90 per cent - only work in 30 or 50 per cent of the people," Dr Roses said. "I wouldn't say that most drugs don't work. I would say that most drugs work in 30 to 50 per cent of people. Drugs out there on the market work, but they don't work in everybody."
The first part has an obvious profit motive. Combining vaccines into fewer shots doesn't have a clear profit motive.
I'm baffled by the "omg!" attitude towards the second part. Anyone who's had antidepressant treatment has likely experienced the need to try a couple different meds before finding the right one. Everyone seems to respond differently to different ones - the same med that works for one person may be totally ineffectual for another. If you're in the 50% that a med doesn't work for, you switch.
"Amid questions about the safety of the HPV vaccine Gardasil one of the lead researchers for the Merck drug is speaking out about its risks, benefits and aggressive marketing... The risks of serious adverse events including death reported after Gardasil use in (the JAMA article by CDC's Dr. Barbara Slade) were 3.4/100,000 doses distributed. The rate of serious adverse events on par with the death rate of cervical cancer.
Over a hundred young girls have died after taking the vaccine, and many others have been left suffering horrible illnesses. Here, look at some of the victims.
Debate the causal link all you want, I'm not taking a stance on this either way, but what I object to is people being labelled cranks for simply asking questions and pointing things out.
This is why I strongly prefer the term "community immunity" over "herd immunity".
Can one investigate, or at least try to be diligent without being vilified?
Yes, absolutely. If you stick to actual reputable provable science, you'll wind up in the "vaccines are safe" camp. If you follow crackpots who don't understand science, you'll wind up somewhere else.
Two issues at stake. Are they effective and what are the side effects?
Vaccines are good against a known thing, such as Hepatitis B or Polio. So you would want your kids to be vaccinated against things like that. However the flu vaccine is not really effective.
Side effects? If you take a Flu vaccine shot or Whooping cough shot you get a different one from that given to pregnant women and babies. Think about that. One contains mercury, the other doesn't. So why doesn't everybody get the safer one? Manufacturer cost.
Which leads to a third issue which I didn't mention - money. Corporations abuse whenever they can, why wouldn't it be the same in the pharma industry? Take the flu vaccine, the effectiveness is not proven, yet we are bombarded everyday with marketing/propaganda that flu shots are available and they only cost 60 bucks.
The Andrew Wakefield MMR-Autism paper has been discredited but it did make a lot of people ask questions. Why are kids today getting so many more vaccinations than before? Why are more kids getting diagnosed with autism? Is there a causal link? Why instead of single shots are different shots getting combined into one super cocktail - to save money, cut corners?
If you read Ben Goldacre's books on the pharma and health industry, you will quickly understand that most big pharma medical trials are poorly controlled experiements and mainly used as marketing tools for new products. They will sponsor/allow dozens of tests confirming a positive result, to crowd out one or two better controlled tests which produce a negative result.
Obviously citations needed, but this is from memory.
At the end of the day, parents have tough decisions, use common sense and understand that medicine evolves.
The last few years, doctors recommended kids take Tylenol before vaccinations to help pain management. Now doctors say take Advil, because Tylenol in young infants and children may be linked to asthma and exczema - and some research indicates Tylenol reduces the effectiveness of the vaccine shot itself!
The flu vaccine certainly is effective. It is not 100% effective, but it is still effective. Getting it makes you much less likely to catch the flu than not getting it. For vulnerable people, this greatly improves their chance of survival. For the rest of us, this greatly improves our chances of not spending a week in bed. Plus, if a significant proportion of the population gets the vaccine, that reduces the chance of it getting transmitted, making it even more effective.
Speaking of cost, my HMO gives my family flu vaccines for free. The only reason they would do this is if they think it's cheaper for them overall, because the campaign reduces doctor visits. They may be motivated solely by profit, but in this case, their desire for profit lines up with my desire for health.
I can't believe you seriously ask why kids are getting so many more vaccinations than before. You might as well ask why kids are getting so many more surgeries than before. Kids get more vaccines today because more vaccines are available. Obviously, kids weren't getting flu vaccines before the flu vaccine was actually developed.
It's not effective. If brakes only operated 9% of the time, would they be effective?
"The current flu shot is only 9% effective for the elderly and only 56% effective in general, according to CDC figures. CDC officials are baffled why the vaccine is so ineffective in the elderly." NYT
And from the Lancet:
"Background: No published meta-analyses have assessed efficacy and effectiveness of licensed influenza vaccines in the USA with sensitive and highly specific diagnostic tests to confirm influenza.
Findings (Interpretation): Influenza vaccines can provide moderate protection against virologically confirmed influenza, but such protection is greatly reduced or absent in some seasons. Evidence for protection in adults aged 65 years or older is lacking. LAIVs consistently show highest efficacy in young children (aged 6 months to 7 years)."
> It's not effective. If brakes only operated 9% of the time, would they be effective?
That's a shitty analogy.
If an aftermarket add-on made old people 9% less likely to get in a car accident, and the general public 56% less likely to, I'd consider that pretty awesome.
Brake failure sends you into the car in front of you. Flu shot failure means you might wind up with the flu - but if everyone else around you got their shot, you're going to be better off.
Flu vaccines are 60% effective, so you're 60% less like to get sick after getting vaccinated. In layman terms, someone who normally gets sick 6 yeas out of 10 would now get sick only 2 years in the same period.
The problem is not your ignorance (we're all ignoran of many things), it's the combination of ignorance, willingness to hold a strong opinion on the subject, and simultaneous lack of curiosity to explore the subject.
Are you describing yourself in that last sentence?
"The current flu shot is only 9% effective for the elderly and only 56% effective in general, according to CDC figures. CDC officials are baffled why the vaccine is so ineffective in the elderly." NYT
And from the Lancet:
"Background: No published meta-analyses have assessed efficacy and effectiveness of licensed influenza vaccines in the USA with sensitive and highly specific diagnostic tests to confirm influenza.
Findings (Interpretation): Influenza vaccines can provide moderate protection against virologically confirmed influenza, but such protection is greatly reduced or absent in some seasons. Evidence for protection in adults aged 65 years or older is lacking. LAIVs consistently show highest efficacy in young children (aged 6 months to 7 years)."
> CDC officials are baffled why the vaccine is so ineffective in the elderly.
The elderly having a weaker immune system is hardly new knowledge. It's one of the reasons the people they come into contact need vaccinations, so the elderly and young children benefit from herd immunity.
> Influenza vaccines can provide moderate protection against virologically confirmed influenza, but such protection is greatly reduced or absent in some seasons.
Hardly surprising or new info. They put a couple strains in the vaccine based on what they think will crop up that flu season. Sometimes it's wrong and the vaccine doesn't do much good. Sometimes a new threat like H1N1 come up mid-season and they make an additional one.
> Heck, if the flu vaccine is so good for you why is it that health-care workers and doctors can't be bothered to get it?
Because there are just as many idiot doctors and nurses as in the general population? You'll find people who don't believe in evolution as doctors and nurses, too. Hell, my wife's nursing textbook had analyzing auras as a possible care component.
Look, 9% is a far cry from 60%... is 9% effective?
The 9% represents elderly people, a target group for the vaccine. I think what's more important is that anyone considering the vaccine should be told that they still need to take precautions with basic hygiene.
The marketing/sales pitch implies too much that getting the shot means they're going to be immune ("be covered this Winter!"). It might result in them getting careless, not washing hands after being on public transport, touching their nose, etc. and getting sick.
> Speak to your OB and ask if the vaccines given to pregnant women are the same as the ones from Walgreens or Safeway... and ask about the mercury.
See, you can't even get that right. Setting aside for a moment the fact that autism rates have continued to increase despite the removal of thimerosal from nearly all vaccines (and that you get a lot more mercury from coal power plant emissions)...
The version of the flu shot that's contraindicated for pregnancy is the nasal spray, which lacks thimerosal because it's a single-dose variant. People at Walgreens/Safeway love the nasal spray.
Flu shot by injection does contain thimerosal, unless you get the special version which doesn't. Walgreens and Safeway have a limited supply of it and people have to call ahead to get this special version.
Given that an OB confirmed the above to me and I watched the OB's nurse administer a single shot without thimerosal, I think I'm more right than you on these matters.
> Walgreens says about the nasal spray "It should not be used in pregnant women" which implies it is harmful in some way, does it not?
Not at all. Sometimes medicines are contraindicated simply because there isn't enough study in the population at question. If the flu shot is known to be safe and the nasal, while believed to be safe, still needs more study in pregnant women, they'll recommend the shot.
> Flu shot by injection does contain thimerosal, unless you get the special version which doesn't.
Some of it does, some of it doesn't. It's a red herring - the safety of thimerosal is long since stablished, attempts from fraudsters like Wakefield notwithstanding.
> Given that an OB confirmed the above to me
Many OBs will spout the American theory that a single glass of red wine is bad for a baby, too. I'll trust the CDC over anecdotes from individual OBs.
The nasal spray is contraindicated for anyone with a weakened immune system because it's an attenuated virus vaccine. That doesn't mean that it's dangerous for the rest of us.
And just how do "the rest of us" know if we have a weakened immune system?
If the objective is to do good and save lives, why not give everybody the same "safer" flu shot as given to pregnant women?
Why not eliminate the risk that a few people wander into Walgreens, not knowing they have a weakened immune system, and then get seriously ill or worse, drop dead?
A weakened immune system is not a condition you can really have without realizing it.
But if you don't want to take the risk, by all means, go for the injection. In fact, my provider has never offered the nasal spray. It's only there because people find it to be more convenient or don't like needles.
Actually, how much do we know about whether a newborn has a compromised immune system or not? As an adult, we may know our medical history and immunity, either through testing or anecdotal evidence. However, we are talking here about newborns and infants between birth and six, who don't have 20 years of medical history that would indicate strength/weakness of an immune system.
First, I'm not a doctor, and people should consult doctors for medical advice.
Do I get to pose random questions without research? I can only assume you were referring to my question "how much do we know about whether a newborn has a compromised immune system or not?" That seems like a pretty legitimate question, does it not? Do I need a medical degree to pose a question regarding how much medical history we have about your average newborn baby?
Am I crossing some line into medical 'research' by asking that question? When babies are born, do they have clear documented medical histories that I'm unaware of?
You also asked if there were "any vaccines given to newborns that are contraindicated for immune-compromised people".
First we need to define newborns. Wikipedia says hours days or a few weeks old. I couldn't find how the CDC defines newborns.
In the first couple days, the only scheduled vaccine per the CDC is usually Hep B. Whether others are given in the first couple days probably depends on doctors, the baby's health, the parents, the country we're in, etc.
From the CDC:
"Hepatitis B vaccination is contraindicated for persons with a history of hypersensitivity to yeast or to any vaccine component (92,189--191). Despite a theoretic risk for allergic reaction to vaccination in persons with allergy to Saccharomyces cerevisiae (baker's yeast), no evidence exists that documents adverse reactions after vaccination of persons with a history of yeast allergy."
So assuming you consider an allergy to be compromising to the immune system (which, by definition, an allergy is), it appears your answer is "yes, there is a vaccine given (or at least recommended) to newborns that is contraindicated for certain immune-compromised people".
Hopefully those contraindicated infants are not given that vaccine, but as I posed earlier, how much do we know about an individual infant's immune system within hours of birth? This probably depends on a lot of things as well - doctors, hospital (or home birth), availability of testing and results, etc.
The RV vaccine is usually given in the first couple months, where the 'newborn' label could still apply depending on how you use the word. RV is contraindicated for SCID.
Below is a full list of contraindications for several vaccines, listed on the CDC website.
An allergic reaction is an overreaction of the immune system to a normally harmless material. "Immune compromise" is a weakening of the immune system. These are, you might note, almost exact opposites. People with weak immune systems won't generally suffer allergic reactions, because an allergic reaction requires the immune system to overreact, and "weak" generally precludes an overreaction. At worst, they wouldn't suffer anything worse than a normal person.
Now, this does raise an interesting question, namely: are newborns ever allergic to this stuff? Could it cause a problem? The answer to the second would seem to be "no" given your CDC quote that there's no evidence for adverse reactions, and that would render the first moot. However, it's still an interesting question, but you'll notice that it's a completely different question from what you asked.
Is your question legitimate? Of course. My point is that mine was legitimate too, but when I posed it, I got a stupid "GIYF" response from you. Apparently you think you have the right to ask questions without research, but I don't. That double standard annoys me.
Worse, you don't even know what you don't know. You get the relationship between allergies and weakened immune systems completely wrong, yet you state that wrongness as fact, so obvious that you call it "by definition".
And then, when I call you out on this bad behavior, I imagine you'll call me a "fascist" and say that I'm "suppressing dissenting views" or some such crap. The reality is, I welcome dissent, but only intelligent dissent. You're not providing it.
I won't call you a fascist. We're nitpicking here. An allergic reaction is obviously not a good reaction to a vaccine, not a desired outcome. Whether an allergy is a result of a compromised immune system (the immune system isn't compromised, but the allergic person is worse off for it) an over active immune system isn't relevant to the argument. I'd also read the CDC quote again. My interpretation was a bit different, as they specified in the second sentence.
Edit - I'm not sure how far you got in my last post, but if we're going to pick about allergies not being a compromised immune system, SCID is the reason for contraindication for RV.
I don't see how it could possibly be "nitpicking" to discuss this stuff in detail. The conversation started out with the question of why some vaccines are not given to certain people, and why that does not mean that these vaccines are dangerous to other people. We then diverted to the question of dangers in infants, but understanding exactly what the dangers are and why certain vaccines have certain dangers is hardly "nitpicking".
And to be honest, no, I did not read the end of your post. I stopped at the moment I got to that completely ludicrous statement that an allergic reaction qualifies as an immune system compromise. This is not some obscure detail, this is an extremely basic fact about how the immune system works.
I wrote a longer reply that you may not have read yet (just posted a few minutes ago). I thought the spirit of the question was more to an irregular immune system and not just specifically a weakened one. Allergies are not indicative of a weakened immune system - whether or not 'compromised' is a term worth using for a system that is irregular is probably not a debate worth having, but the individual clearly is compromised.
Agreed that it's not nitpicking to know why vaccines cause a potential danger - overactive or underactive immune systems obviously react (or don't) in different ways, but I understood the nature of the question to be much less specific (are vaccines contraindicated in the sick, instead of are vaccines contraindicated in this specific group of sick people).
What you point out is not an obscure detail, but if the spirit of the conversation were how I had interpreted it, the detail wouldn't be relevant. I focused more on the vaccine being recommended to sick people and not people sick with x.
I was on mobile for my first response, but I do want to address your comments.
This whole thing got started when I replied to a comment you made stating "A weakened immune system is not a condition you can really have without realizing it."
My response was a rhetorical question about how we don't know about a newborn's immune system. If it wasn't clear that "how much do we know about whether a newborn has a compromised immune system or not" was a rhetorical question, I apologize for not making that more clear, but I think the question has an obvious answer and I didn't ask it to get your opinion. If you feel that question has an answer other than "very little", feel free to elaborate.
The reason I asked that question is that your statement that one cannot have a weakened immune system without knowing only applies to adults, as baby in the first moments does not have a medical history. So yes, someone can have a weakened immune system without anyone knowing it, but likely that would be at birth and in the earliest days of lives - when some vaccinations take place. As one gets older, weakened immune systems might become more evident, but they would be least evident at birth. I'm not sure we can debate that as anything but fact, but I'm certainly willing to listen to dissenting views on that.
So I ask a rhetorical question, and your response is to pose a question to me - "Are there any vaccines given to newborns that are contraindicated for immune-compromised people? That strikes me as rather unlikely."
Your question clearly wasn't a rhetorical question, and was something that someone could just look up (thus, the Google comment). I could have said 'I believe there are but don't care to look them up', but I figured you'd just look them up yourself and that would be the end of it. I was aware that there were some vaccines that were contraindicated for certain allergies and other conditions, mainly because I wasn't able to get certain vaccines as a child.
I'm honestly not sure why you didn't just look it up, unless you were more interested in my response than what you would have found on your own. But I did answer it, yet you chose to pick apart the one answer
Your response to that was "So you get to pose random questions without research, but I don't? How's that work?" I wasn't posing a random question, and my rhetorical question really shouldn't require research. Again, I think the answer was pretty obvious - if someone has a very brief lifespan, the person would likely have little medical history. There is a double standard about being expected to answer rhetorical question vs answering a factual question that you could also look up.
The answer to your question was clearly something you could have found on your own, but you asked me instead. Were you looking for an answer, or just looking to see how I'd answer it?
So I write out a longer reply, which you find some flaws with. You don't reference the part about RV/SCID in your reply, which seems to be the most relevant part of my response. That was the question you asked, yet you didn't even acknowledge the answer.
An allergy is not indicative of a weakened immune system, and I could have worded that a bit better. The person with allergies is 'compromised', and having an overactive immune system does compromise an individual. Having incredibly low blood pressure is dangerous, and having incredibly high blood pressure is dangerous too. Both indicate a compromised system that is not in balance, just as severe allergy and a condition such as SCID are impairments.
Whether or not an immune system is overactive (allergy) or weakened, I think using the term 'compromised' might have been the issue. Instead of "assuming you consider an allergy to be compromising to the immune system ", I could have left off at 'compromising'.
I did reference RV and SCID in the post as well, but you didn't reference those in your reply. I think your question, as asked literally, would be answered by RV being contraindicated in SCID cases. I answered the question as if you'd asked if vaccines were contraindicated in people with 'immune system irregularities' instead of 'immune system deficiencies'. The difference is, in my opinion, splitting hairs for the purpose of our dialogue, but that was what you chose to go with.
So yes, RV is contraindicated in SCID patients, and RV is recommended for newborns if you use the term newborns to indicate weeks instead of days. Hep B is not contraindicated for infants with weakened immune systems, but is contraindicated for infants with irregular immune systems that might be overreactive to yeast.
Regarding the calling out on bad behavior, I don't think I've behaved badly unless you somehow feel that my failure to clarify the difference between a weakened immune system and an overreactive one is a sin. What we are discussing here are mostly facts, not really opinions, and there really isn't much room for actual dissent. I have not problem with your opinions, as you haven't really provided any other than your opinions on my comments. I don't think you're suppressing any views. I'm not really providing opinions here, just facts for the most part (with the obvious clarification necessary to define allergy as irregular immune system instead of weakened).
> And just how do "the rest of us" know if we have a weakened immune system?
You generally know if you're undergoing chemo, have AIDS, are pregnant, are over 50, etc. The provider administering will jog your memory, too.
> If the objective is to do good and save lives, why not give everybody the same "safer" flu shot as given to pregnant women?
According to Wikipedia, there's evidence it's more effective in young children. As with most medical treatments, there are risks and benefits that must be considered. The fact that it doesn't require a needle also has significant benefits, as fear of needles can be a barrier to vaccination.
By all means, continue the argument from ignorance and personal incredulity, though.
Yes, I do find it quite incredible that questioning the efficacy of vaccines is like a red flag to a bull for some people.
Even though the Lancet has published research examining the flu vaccine's effectiveness, it appears any kind of discussion is strictly forbidden.
I don't want to use the word "fascist" but this discussion has clearly shown that the people who are truly ignorant are those who fail to consider dissenting viewpoints.
> I don't want to use the word "fascist" but this discussion has clearly shown that the people who are truly ignorant are those who fail to consider dissenting viewpoints.
I have little patience for the "explain this... oh... well, explain THIS! oh... well..." game vaccine doubters play.
"If this gravity stuff worked like you said, then cars would all be stuck to the ground."
"Well actually, they are."
"Sure, usually, but I saw a picture of a car that landed on top of another car. Clearly there are some flaws in this gravity thing."
"It's true that there are ways to get cars off the ground, but they don't stay off the ground for long, and their behavior still fits entirely within the theory of gravity. This is pretty basic stuff and you should really research it."
And then they call you a "fascist" for "not tolerating dissenting views".
Personally, I am for vaccination. I'm way over vaccinated due to trips to third world countries -- sometimes I would get 6 shots over 2 days. However the spacing for vaccinations in infants seems rushed, and the ingredients are something I wouldn't let my kid touch or eat. (kind of like how you wouldn't feed your kid honey until after they're one) I recently told our doctor we wanted an ingredient list of the vaccines they were planning to administer, so we could attempt to understand, before following their schedule in ignorance. I definitely don't want my kid to have the diseases our grand parents grew up with, and that means vaccinating.
I'm wondering if a doctor would balk at signing a document of liability for {x} resulting from vaccination. If she wouldn't put her career behind her belief, should I believe her?
Does herd immunity require herd mentality? Can one investigate, or at least try to be diligent without being vilified?