A Not So Religious Exemption?
October 18, 2007 by Kristina Chew, PhD
Filed under Health
Fear of a child becoming autistic from a vaccine or something in a vaccine has led to parents choosing not vaccinating their children and thus making outbreaks of infectious diseases possible. A story in today’s Associated Press reports that parents are now in effect using religion and even lying about their religious beliefs in order to seek a religious exemption from vaccination for their child:
Twenty-eight states, including Florida, Massachusetts and New York, allow parents to opt out for medical or religious reasons only. Twenty other states, among them California, Pennsylvania, Texas and Ohio, also allow parents to cite personal or philosophical reasons. Mississippi and West Virginia allow exemptions for medical reasons only.
From 2003 to 2007, religious exemptions for kindergartners increased, in some cases doubled or tripled, in 20 of the 28 states that allow only medical or religious exemptions, the AP found. Religious exemptions decreased in three of these states – Nebraska, Wyoming, South Carolina – and were unchanged in five others.
The rate of exemption requests is also increasing.
For example, in Massachusetts, the rate of those seeking exemptions has more than doubled in the past decade – from 0.24 percent, or 210, in 1996 to 0.60 percent, or 474, in 2006.
In Florida, 1,249 children claimed religious exemptions in 2006, almost double the 661 who did so just four years earlier. That was an increase of 0.3 to 0.6 percent of the student population. Georgia, New Hampshire and Alabama saw their rates double in the past four years.
Sample letters to request a religious exemption can be found online (here and here for example.
Is seeking a religious exemption from vaccination for a child out of fear of autism doing the wrong thing for the wrong reasons?
Geez, Are people still debating Simpsonwood?
http://www.autismspeaks.org/government_affairs/help_thimerosal_report.php
People can and do complain that the HELP committee is “corrupt” as well. That only serves to demonstrate the lengths of conspiracy theory that are needed to support the supposed link.
Take a look at what they say about Vaerstaeten. Looks to me like he was a post-doc (or had a similar appointment) at CDC. The great things about post-docs is that they bring really tallented people into the US and we get to keep many of them.
Wouldn’t it have been nice to get another autism researcher into the US? I mean, rather than scaring him (and probably many others) away?
So he went back to Europe. Can you blame him? He held a temporary position at CDC. People twisted his words, misinterpreted his preliminary findings, plagarized his work…
The whole Simsonwood witch hunt has given the US autism community a big black eye.
Healthy people can get and die from these diseases. Sick people diserve to be protected from them the same. I am not upset by Jenny speaking about all of the things that she has tried with her son. Our daughter has been dairy free for some time and is able to communicate better when she is. The problem that I have is that she says things like I would never vaccinate another child and she does not discuss the therapies that helped him as well as the bio med treatments and although my daughter is doing much better I wuld not say that she is cured or that she does not have autism at this point. On Oprah she started out saying that he will always have autism and by the time she got to Larry King He did not. That has been my problem with her all along I think it is good to share our experiences so that parents can have hope but her experience seems to carry more weight and she is look at as an expert on Autism when she is as all parents are just an expert on her son.
Amanda, you are right regarding health and worth. I chose to ignore it to try and keep a tone of civility overall, but it’s right to be disgusted.
Cliff
“I also think it’s really stupid to take these experimental risks on children at such a young age when the risk of disease at that particular age is not very substantial in most of the cases.”
Tell me that doesn’t say what I think it says. Please.
It strikes me that it is difficult to ding medical researchers who spend their lives studying the immune system as no having a good understanding when you appear to be basing your discussions on a clearly fatal flaw in reasoning.
People who forget the lessons of the past are doomed to repeat them. When it comes to public health, they are doomed to take others with them.
Cliff,
a) Do you really think the risk of damage from measles is the same for a child in a third world country as it would be for an unvaccinated population in North America?
The death rates (and I believe incident rates) for measles were dropping long before vaccines were introduced. That previous reduction was brought about by factors not related to vaccines so clearly other factors can drastically affect the rates of outcomes from the disease or the incidence. I will check your book to see if it appropriately addresses these things. But I am not yet convinced that . I will certainly agree that it is very probable that the extremely low risk in our currently vaccinated population would change if the vaccination wan’t done, but I am not at all convinced the rates would be as serious as people are theorizing.
1b) The complaint in the letter appears to be an accusation of violation of the rules of the COI guidelines for the journal which published the study. However, based on that document you provided and the letter referenced inside, he does appear clean. However, that document you provided did substantiate other instances of COI within that IOM commitee member… sigh.
2) Don’t get me wrong. I am not totally anti-vaccination, just like I’m not anti-medication either. I think that each vaccine needs to be analyzed for it’s own merit, just like any drug. Anti-biotics are also generally accepted as being effective and helpful, but each specific case must be analyzed and specific anti-biotics are very dangerous to specific individuals. I believe the same applies to vaccines, yet no investigation is done to determine which individuals are succeptible. Instead huge amounts of funding are pored into pressuring people to just get it done without a second thought.
You better check that CRS number. In 1969 65K cases of RUBELLA were logged — and for non-pregnant women, it is a completely benign disease. The largest number of CRS cases in a single year was ~ 69 in 1970. Where did you get your outrageous number from? If I really believed those numbers to be true, I would be worried too.
I would also be interested in what you think the rate of CRS incidence is amoung women infected with rubella during pregnancy.
This is actually a good case example where one can avoid mass medication, and only vaccinate those at risk since it is such a small percentage.
D) So, let me ask this then: Can you scientifically quantify how effective the vaccine will be in preventing me from contracting said disease? My impression is that you can only guage the effectiveness of producing anti-bodies in the individual vaccinated. You would then need to determine in what percentage of cases, anti-bodies alone provide adequate protection against said disease.
E) I think if you want to FORCE mass medication upon a population it is incumbent to prove safety first, not assume innocence. Again, every case is specific. Just because vaccine X works, does not mean that vaccine Y will. There are many failed vaccines.
Taking a very targeted study group, and then applying the results to a whole non-homogenous population is also known to be fraught with problems — we’ve seen this with the cough medicine, we’ve seen it with Vioxx. Given that people want to mandate vaccination for everyone, even a small percentage of problems for certain types of people still impacts a significant number of people.
Additionally, small numbers of affected people won’t show up in an epidemiology study — which is the type of study that is favoured by the CDC etc. Again, you state that lots of analysis has been done, but I urge you to read the Cochrane report, which basically concluded that there was no credible evidence to determine the safety or efficacy of the MMR vaccine. And they looked at thousands of studies. Now they concluded as you do that “General Scientific Consensus” states that it is safe. The irony is that none of the Analysis done to date in the form of studies was deemed credible.
So that brings us back to the same place. The general medical community’s consensus is that they are safe and effective, but we lack credible evidence of safety and efficacy, and in certain instances, the risk rates quoted are inflated or at a minimum debated.
Again, if you intent to force or mandate mass medication it is incumbent to prove safety for the individuals. When someone experiences death or damage after a vaccine is given today, it is rarely followed up and often the association is immediately disregarded.
There is certainly no clear cut answer IMO. It is clear if you place blind trust in the general medical community. My experience with this is that the general medical community does not merit blind trust. Specific doctors, and treatments certainly do. The data (and the doctors I trust) have not been able to convince me with the evidence available today that the vaccines are safe for my children at their current age (very young) and they have not convinced me that the risks of not vaccinating are larger.
I find the situation very frustrating as well.
As for the Ghost writing, the study results are almost definitely underestimating the problem because the disclosure for the study was voluntary. Additionally, the danish study (where many of the Thimerosal epidemiology come from) found that most often it was the statistician who was the ghost writer donated by the funding party. We all know that the statistician ultimately provides the data that will determine the outcome of those types of studies.
Matt,
Why don’t you stick to Analogies that actually apply. It’s outrageous statements like yours that chip away at the other credible statements you might actually make.
“Having my kid die of something like measles (or pass it on to someone else who dies) would be like letting him die of appendicitis because I don’t believe in surgery. People have tried religious exemptions for that as well.”
Let’s examine the starting point here:
Case 1: Healthy Child
Case 2: Child with Terminal Illness
Hmm, we’re off to a bad start already.
Case 1:
* Unquantified risk of medical intervention
* unquantifiable efficacy of medical intervention
* Unquantified risk to health of non-intervention
Case 2:
* Quantifiable risk to health (near 100% terminal)
* Quantifiable risk of medical intervention (low)
* Quantifiable effectiveness of intervention( very high)
Boy, that’s a tough one. Stick to the facts.
Amanda,
Unfortunately, a completely logical decision boils down to risks. You can’t quantify the risk to my healthy child of this medical intervention. Even worse, the system isn’t properly tracking the safety to determine the risk.
I’m going to assume for this discussion you have a child with a known health problem like asthma. (just for discussion purposes)
People with known health problems face risks from all illnesses, but you also can’t quantify the risk my unvaccinated child posses to your unhealthy child.
Let’s look at some more logic. The death rates and acquisition rates of some of these diseases are very low and the effects on different people vary quite a lot. I think it is fair to say if you are healthier, than your odds of contracting and/or suffering damage are reduced.
So it is in your best interest that I keep my child as healthy as possible so that your child will be exposed to far fewer problems. I pay a lot of attention to my child’s diet, exposure when sick, exercise etc, so there are a lot more factors involved in health than vaccination status. In fact, I would even be bold enough to state, that your child would likely be much safer spending time with mine than with many of the other kids, because she is in fact above average health.
Philosophically, I think you bring up an interesting issue as well. HUGE amounts of money are being invested to eliminate all diseases in order to protect a growing number of vulernable people in our modern populations. I think that this is a flawed approach since there is no evidence at all that all threatening infectious diseases could ever be effectively eliminated. Yet you and others advocate an approach that requires putting healthy individuals at risk for such an intervention even though they don’t need it.
Why not spend the money on helping determine why your child is actually at risk, and possibly addressing the health problem directly without putting healthy people at risk?
Matt,
“Tell me that doesn’t say what I think it says. Please.
It strikes me that it is difficult to ding medical researchers who spend their lives studying the immune system as no having a good understanding when you appear to be basing your discussions on a clearly fatal flaw in reasoning.
People who forget the lessons of the past are doomed to repeat them. When it comes to public health, they are doomed to take others with them.”
Please stick to facts. Publish your numbers and we can debate something. Otherwise your comments are pure rhetoric.
But just for fun: What is the risk to my 2 month old of Hepititus B? How about the Flu? How about Rubella? How about Tetanus?
Give me a break.
Matt,
Did you ever read the simpsonwood transcripts through? After you’ve read them through, come back and we’ll have a frank discussion about the quality of CDC decision making.
You’ll also note, my allegations were only of conflict of interest, not of misconduct of fraudulant behaviour. I have conceeded with Cliff, that Vaerstaaten was probably not in conflict of interest in this case. However, my other comments on the conference still stand.
Don’t go finding rhetoric posted by others and attribute them to me.
Can you provide a link to the proceedings, please?
Cliff
Apparently I am not allowed to participate. One of my comments is still awaiting moderation.
So be it.
Still no one has given any real scientific documentation that measles and mumps are typically mild. Those of who think they are mild feel and that those children who die from vaccine preventable diseases deserve their fate smacks of eugenics. “Let only the strong survive.”
“But just for fun: What is the risk to my 2 month old of Hepititus B? How about the Flu? How about Rubella? How about Tetanus”
Before that could even begin to be assessed we’d need to determine in what location/s your two month-old is living/visiting.
Schwartz, I have asthma, as do my brothers and parents. I have been on Prednisone for asthma, which depresses the immune system (just finally got off of it). I have a friend who is on Prednisone for something else, permanently. She got whooping cough from someone’s unvaccinated child. It came close to killing her and she dislocated five ribs coughing (she also has Ehlers-Danlos, a connective tissue condition that causes easy dislocations), and had a number of seizures because of dehydration from the coughing.
The risk to people like her or me is death. The supposed risk most people are talking about with vaccinations is autism. If someone has a documented severe reaction to vaccines, they shouldn’t take them, and I’ve never heard anyone argue with that (I actually get warnings about that whenever I get a vaccination, they tell me what to watch out for and where to go and what to do about it). But yes I can quantify that autism is not worse than death and that even if vaccines caused autism (which they don’t) it would be easily worth not spreading diseases that kill people.
I continue to find the idea that people like me and my friends can simply be written off because we’re in poor health (I’ve been in and out of emergency rooms all year for reactions to things like the common cold, which are much less serious than many of the diseases vaccinated against) incredibly offensive.
I’m going to respond a little of the thing you said in regards to Amanda’s post.
In the terms you are asking for, you can’t quantify much of any medical research. The data in specifics to the observance of effects on kids does exist, but not in the long-term, ultimate status you are asking for, as I noted above.
Yes, you can quantify it in statistical terms, but again not in any ultimate state. But you can’t do it the other way either. Thus, we have to rely on the admittedly vague and non-ultimate “reasonable conclusion”, and in the realm of childhood diseases we have enough data for that (again, I’ll reference the review).
I’d counter that “The death rates and acquisition rates are low for some of these diseases” with “The death rates and acquisition rates are high for some of these diseases”, because it actually follows reasonably from the statement prior. That’s logic from your statement in a very direct sense.
And now I’m going to bring full attention to the point protecting “a growing number of people”. I’m going to leave aside that this growing number of people who can catch these diseases are a majority. Let’s look at the assumptions themselves, and the full application of that logic.
Ok, so the statement basically is that money should not be spent to prevent diseases from harming a minority, because it draws away fund that could be used to help the majority. It makes the assumption of the value being placed on the general contentment of the entire majority, because the money is not such that giving the relevant amount to the minority actually harms the entire majority and perhaps creates a smaller risk for a few (autism is not worse than death) than that facing the minority, over the clear safety of the minority. That puts the value of life with the majority over the minority; I.E people with diseases are less valuable than healthy ones. They have less to contribute, are not as good of people, and can be worked away if needed.
Following that, all cancer research must be halted. That’s a ton of money being given to a minority that could be used for the majority. And we might never be able to find a cure for all cancers. Therefore, cancer treatment should receive no money.
Also, in a broader context, money shouldn’t used in ways to aid the poor in an effective way. After all, we might not be able to make all people not poor, and the poor are not a majority. Therefore, no money should be given to the poor.
This could go onto to largely any social issue. Most situations involve a minority of some kind. Frankly, we all have aspects of ourselves that make us minorities in that regard. And those issues, as stated through that logic, aren’t to addressed. Only things that fall strictly above 50% can be given funding.
I’m not going to attack the truth value of these statements, because in doing so I would be stating a personal moral belief. But do the following implications really fit in with your morality?
Cliff
HCN, sorry about your comment not going through—if you include a lot of links, the comments sometimes end up needing moderation and I was out all afternoon. Please let me know if that happens again and I apologize for the delay.
Cliff,
I appreciate the frank and patient discussion. Using text alone it is sometimes difficult to convey the appropriate ideas.
I read yours and Amanda’s post, and I guess I’m surprised on how you see my point of view from your perspective.
I’ll try to address this first from the high level:
1) Although I certainly feel a strong mandate to help other people (and I’m very active in other aspects), the health of my child is my primary concern as dicated by society and the law.
I personally feel that the safety of vaccines, the risks of the original diseases to the vaccinated populations, and the efficacy are all overstated — to what degree is what I am constantly trying to find out. So where one person sees a high risk to their unhealthy child due to my child’s vaccination status, I don’t see a high risk at all.
So it’s not really a problem of morality, it’s an issue of perception. You and others feel very strongly that my child and I (I will not get any booster vaccines, or the flu vaccine, or any of the new vaccines) are introducing a lot of risk.
I and others feel very strongly that we are not introducing any substantial risk and that we are actually protecting our own children from an unacceptable level of risk.
For an even further clarification, I am very surprised that parents of vaccinated children feel my child introduces a risk to them — they must not have confidence in the vaccine. If they were seriously concerned that their child was in the published small percentage (which I personally believe is understated) for whom the vaccine doesn’t work, they could easily get their child tested and get another shot. So blaming me or my children for increasing risk to them seems pretty illogical and represents a serious flaw in their logic somewhere. The only people who actually might be able to accuse me of putting them at higher risk are those that can’t have the vaccine — an extremely small minority according to the “established Medical community”. And my argument to Amanda still holds in that case, because I believe that my strict attention to overall health make my child safer to associate with than the average vaccinated child. That is because these people are usually succeptible to a wide variety of normally benign illnesses and an overall healthier child means much less risk. I would actually ask if those parents would feel comfortable questioning the diet and sanitary conditions of these other children? Maybe they do?
I can rephrase your exact morality question to those who want to force vaccines on others without investing appropriate amounts of effort into discovering and protecting those at risk from the vaccines themselves.
So we are left with arguing over the evidence in the hopes of altering the perception of the other side.
I don’t believe that everyone who is fanatically pro-vaccine is amoral, despite my repulsion of the ideas they espouse and promote — probably very similar to your feelings from the other perspective.
I will immediately agree with your statement: ““The death rates and acquisition rates are high for some of these diseases”” because that is exactly how I intended to word it. I am not anti-vaccination. Given the option, I would have vaccinated my daughters for specific illnesses that I feel fall into this category. There is also a high likelihood that I will vaccinate them for some of these things as they get older.
However, I feel very strongly that the age of vaccination, and the growing combination of illnesses (many unneccessary) included in the vaccines introduces an unnecessary risk/reward especially for infants and young children.
I am trying very hard to find out as much credible data about a couple of these illnesses, and I am finding it very difficult given my lack of trust in the established medical community.
I also think you misread or misinterpreted my post, or perhaps it was a bit misleading. I’ll go through a specific example:
Disease A is extremely mild in the population but causes people to miss a couple days of school/work. There are a growing number of people with asthma (but no where near a majority of people — even a full percentage point is significant but no where near majority), who have an increased percentage risk of suffering more serious consequences of disease A. We invest a lot of money into a vaccine for disease A in the hope of eliminating it. The vaccine has a risk of causing damage in a small percentage of the applicants.
So we just spent a lot of money on a vaccine, caused damage in a percentage of previously healthy individuals and the Asthmatics although theoretically protected from disease A, still suffer all of the other effects of the disease and are still undoubtedly at risk from other diseases that healthy are not at risk from.
What I proposed was to invest that money into helping the MINORITY asthmatics solve their asthma. That would be a net benefit to everyone, and certainly more beneficial to the Asthmatics and the healthy people.
I hope you can see that your long slippery slope didn’t represent what I was saying.
PS: I have the proceedings on my computer in PDF form so I’ll look to see where I can find a link.
Cliff,
Alas, I can only find a link on an anti-thimerosal site. Probably because the CDC resisted releasing the transcript in the first place, and only after requests through freedom of information did they release it (or so the story goes).
But then, even the pro-Mercury people seem to use the same link.
I hope it doesn’t offend your sensibilities
http://www.safeminds.org/legislation/foia/Simpsonwood_Transcript.pdf
Amanda,
I hope you read my last post to Cliff. In no way am I writing off people like you. My position is that more money should be spent on fixing your problems, rather than vaccinating a non-at-risk population (and putting them at an undefined risk) for a small fraction of the illnesses that could endanger you.
I would also be curious on how you knew the child who gave your friend whopping cough was not vaccinated, or if you know how they contracted it themselves. The last 2 outbreaks of Pertussis (which occurred in my neighbourhood daycares here in Toronto) went right through the vaccinated population of children. Even more telling was that the Department of Health treated all children (vaccinated or not) with the same quarantine/treatment rules (stay home for 20 days, or go on anti-biotics for 10 days). What does that tell you about the confidence in the vaccine? And these are children that were recently vaccinated too, so it’s not like they were lacking a booster shot.
If the unvaccinated child acquired pertussis from a vaccinated child, you can’t even state that they are to blame, because clearly the vaccine wasn’t working in that case anyways.
It would be good if you could provide a bit more data behind your example so I can feel confident that the appropriate analysis of the outbreak was done.
Additionally, I will repeat that it is not fear of Autism that drove my decision. In fact, my decision is not fear based at all. It is a lack of credible numbers that allow me to make an informed decision. And given the lack of safety data, I choose to not engage in a medical intervention. And BTW, death among other things is also a rare complication of vaccination.
One thing about your post that disturbs me is that you appear to indicate that it would be better to cause some unnamed number of otherwise healthy individuals to become autistic in order to possibly save another set of unnamed number of individuals.
So do you hypothetically care to put real numbers to that statement? How many children of other parents would you be willing to sacrifice to Autism in order to possibly (because you don’t know if you’ll ever interact with them, or if you’ll be attacked by something else) protect one person who is immunocompromised?
(DISCLAIMER: This is a hypothetical statement. I am not claiming there is credible evidence to suggest a correlation between vaccination and autism at this time)
“I continue to find the idea that people like me and my friends can simply be written off because we’re in poor health”
I would like you to point out the place in my posts where I stated that immunocompromised individuals should be written off because I never intended to state anything like that at all.
I find it incredibly ironic that you hold such vehemence to my position, when I espouse applying the research money to helping your specific condition rather than an (what I consider futile) attempt to eliminate every infectious disease in everyone you interact with.
nym-d out,
I live in Toronto. Very modern state of the art medical facilities but high immigrant population as well.
I am curious which set of numbers you’ll choose to use.
nym-d out
I should add that the air quality is probably poorer than average for North America.
HCN,
I debated whether to respond to your inflammatory remarks, but I decided to give you the benefit of the doubt for trying to post references.
It is indeed difficult to find published numbers on the actual affects of mumps, but if you look up any of the “general medical community” (which you seem to treat as biblical in nature) you’ll find that they all say mumps is a relatively benign disease for people ages 7 and younger. Apparently it is extremely rare for someone under the age of 2 (according to Wikipedia I think) to contract the disease at all. People can contract the mumps and not even know they had it (kind of like West Nile Virus that way).
I believe contracting the mumps as a child provides a lifelong immunity unlike the vaccine. I recommend you read the following link discussing the huge mumps outbreak in the US in 2005/2006.
http://healthlink.mcw.edu/article/1031002654.html
It is amazing how little the “established Medical community” understands what happened. I find it amazing that they all prescribe MMR as a solution, yet in the same breath note it’s failure in the one state that applied the appropriate strategy yet still suffered an outbreak.
If you keep reading, you see some experts referring to the “real world”. They are practically coming out and saying that the published numbers don’t apply to the “real world”. Amazing.
HCN,
I appologize for missing your earlier post to the links.
The CDC link contains the information you were looking for yourself (mild childhood illness), so I wonder if you asked the question in bad faith?
Alas, the risks are not really discernable from their data either for similar reasons as mentionned before. Since there are so few deaths due to mumps, I find it strange that they do not deign to provide information as to how many people were already compromised or died of complications. You would have to re-evaluate all of the Vaccine AE’s if you included deaths due to complications.
It’s also pretty clear from recent history that some of their numbers aren’t right given the followup from the outbreak that occured recently in the US.
Looking at the study you provided, it provides some more information. It does give us a purportedly better number of death ratio, but also notes that the vast majority of the people died of pnemonia or were immunocompromised. As I stated earlier, one should treat any disease very seriously, and a lot of people contract (and die from) pnemonia for a variety of reasons. As outlined in the article earlier, there was an indication that the original illness was not taken seriously until it developed into something much more serious. The problem is that mumps is also asymptomatic and resembles other illnesses, so the number of deaths / cases is bound to be overestimated.
Additionally, no ages were given in the abstract or by the CDC so I still can’t determine the risk to my infant or young child. Please remember, I’m not blanket anti-vaccination. I think the schedule and quantity of vaccines introduces undue risk. That would require age specific data, which they choose not to provide for some unknown reason.
Even if we ignored those problems, and pretended we could quantify the risk for a child of a specific age in modern North America, you have no data to quantify the risk of reaction to MMR and this was proven quite thoroughly by the Cochrane report.
We’re still missing one half of the equation. I would also propose that the Vaccine events are vastly underreported in the poor tracking systems that do exist, and that rarely would the vaccine be blamed if a child died from a complication (because the doctor would never even suspect the vaccine as being responsible) unlike the Mumps cases where clearly the vast majority of deaths are due to complications (likely similar for varicella).
Well, it seems I mixed up measles and mumps in the previous post. But most of the post still applies with the exception of the Asymptomatic part. I don’t think that measles is ever asymptomatic.
If I may (no pun intended) inject a question in the spirit of the original post: Given all of the studies and research cited, it would seem that parents ought to draw on all those in defending a decision not to vaccinate a child to a school district. Why, instead, can parents claim that their religious beliefs are the reason for not vaccinating? Why are they allowed to “use” religion in this way?
Kristina,
I can’t speak for them, but in certain states religious exemption is the only exception available. No other exemptions are allowed.
Mr. Schwartz,
sorry if you felt I was attributing comments to you that weren’t there. I am glad that you would want to distance yourself from many of those. However, keep in mind that it is a blog response. As you have very well demonstrated, people tend to bring in new information in responses.
It is great that you are going to source material rather than relying on the often really bad analyses that are published. However, to imply that you have and others haven’t does not make for a good discussion. This is especially true when you make blatant errors.
“Others have been hired by Big Pharma while investigating vaccine issues for the CDC Vaerstrateen while investigating thimerosal/Mercury was the most blatent)”
Verstraeten was on a temporary position to the CDC. He was not “hired away”. That was made clear in the HELP committee report.
If you want to discuss Verstraeten’s report to the Simpsonwood conference, you will keep in mind that he had only been working for CDC for a year, right? Having read the trascripts you know that. Puts things in a new light when you consider that he was presenting
You are aware of the transcription errors? Oddly enough quotes from groups that made their own transcriptions tend to get it correct. When you get that one, you will see that one of the most famous quotes in Simpsonwood was made by someone who later signed onto the IOM report. You do know who I am talking about, right?
See how much better this is that what could have happened given your tone of “I’ve read the sources, come back when you have” (or however you phrased it)? Your tone would invite a response that was much more direct towards you than the simple corrections.
You also call for more facts and citations while not giving them yourself. You also avoided the main question
Mostly, however, you are not addressing what is the real question on a blog such as this: what is the connection to autism? Discussing “known differences in excretion” of mercury, and “toxicology” and the rest doesn’t connect vaccines and/or mercury to autism.
What it does is make it seem like there is a connection by discussing them on the same page.
It is very common. I think often the people using it aren’t even aware of it.
You’re acting as if there can either be research into conditions like mine and my friend’s (which there already is plenty of) or vaccines, but not both. That’s why I’m having trouble taking your viewpoint seriously. There already is research and they’re a long way from curing every possible condition that can be aggravated by diseases that they already know how to reduce the incidence of greatly. So you’re just not making sense in that regard.
Kristina,
Test post — the system doesn’t like something in my next post… sigh.
Amanda,
Money and research effort are not unlimited. How much research money is being spent on vaccines vs research into your condition or others that are similar? I can guess the answer, because research dollars will be directed where the most profit can be made. Vaccine makers will make a lot more money off of medicating everyone vs helping a minority.
Response Part 2
It just doesn’t make sense to invest money to slowly eliminate every infectious disease in the world. That is what will be required, and if you follow your logic, that is effectively what you’re promoting.
It’s not a realistic objective. I haven’t seen any credible theory to show that it is a reasonable goal. And increasing vaccines will cause more children to suffer adverse reactions, including serious ones causing permanent damage.
I’m actually quite surprised that someone in your situation seems to take such a cavalier attitude to the real damage that does occur due to vaccines, and I’m not talking Autism.
Matt,
I am hopefully not the first person to admit that I do make mistakes, and you are welcome to point them out. You’ll note that I did adjust my statements on Verstraaten in my discussion with Cliff. You’ll also note, that the HELP report only published their findings in the last month and I had not read the whole report through. The Simpsonwood conference was 7 years ago. You’ll also note that they did confirm several points of conflict of interest in the subsequent IOM conference on Thimerosal. That was the main point of my reference in the first place: conflict of interest, not allegations of fraud.
My other comments about simpsonwood do not refer to issues with Vaerstraaten and I think restricting the “Autism community’s” complaints to that issue alone is doing it a disservice.
My particular issues are how poorly informed the members of these committees really were about basic biological toxins and their effect. Several members had a very Cavalier attitude with which they approached safety issues. Others were very clear that their first priority was the protection of the program, not safety.
You see, it wasn’t a particular finding, or even an attempt to hide something that I’m referring to so any subsequent findings of fact regarding vaccines will not change what I learned from reading the transcript.
I read that transcript because I was reading a discussion on the conference by someone who was concerned about a link between thimerosal and vaccines. As I read the critique, I was quite skeptical that some of the quotes were being taken out of context, but the critique linked directly to the report. So I read it, and found to my dismay, that most of what was being reported was true. Transcription errors will not change the overall attitude exuded by doctors at that conference, and it is not an attitude of rigour around safety, my first and biggest issue with the whole vaccine program. The lack of knowledge on some basic concepts by some members was astounding, and even worse, the lack of perception that there was even a possible problem completely changed my impression of that organization. Overall, given the wide breadth and impact of any national vaccination program, there should be a lot more people that have a broad based knowledge of health rather than restricting the decision making to a bunch of extremely narrow focussed researchers.
Kristina posted this article around why people would use religion to exempt themselves from vaccinating their children. Your assumption is that it is only due to fear of Autism. I am pointing out that (in the spirit of the original post) that the safety aspects of vaccines are not fully understood, and that Autism is not the only concern among those of us who choose not to vaccinate their children. It is ironic, that it was not my primary concern 5 years ago when I started researching vaccines and made my initial decision. The past few years have brought Autism to the forefront of the vaccine debate, so that it why I became more informed about it. If Kristina thinks I’ve wandered too far off topic, then I will be happy to stop here in deference to her Blog.
No, I’m enjoying this discussion, if you don’t mind, Ms. Schwartz.
1) I guess if you didn’t recognize some general principles of immunology, you wouldn’t have to recognize that there were serious associated dangers. The efficacy, statistically, has been shown now and again, and vaccines certainly were efficient enough to eradicate smallpox (different from eliminate). And smallpox in 1964 contracted 15 million and killed another 2 million. So I do think there are very serious risks that are prevented by vaccines. And, on the converse, it hasn’t been strongly scientifically that vaccines harm. We’re talking contingencies when talking about vaccine danger. We’re talking about facts when talking about vaccine safety (in large part, anyway).
And in your example you still trip the morality question, though I admit I have to disagree with part of the analysis; the fact that they aren’t protected seems a little random, where in fact they are protected. The morality trip, however, is at still at risk from other diseases. Does that validate allowing them to die from this one?
And helping asthma and every other disease that would be susceptible (because asthma isn’t the only one that will be such) would be an idea, but for that the money may not work. There is a guaranteed way to help them, or to hurt them, and throwing it into research might help, but reasonably may not, and thus the money was then spent in a futile manner while people die. That’s at least dangerous, and again it assumes that we must remove the quality in order for the right to be equally protected.
Thing is, the diseases get bounced around and induced, you are possibly going to see an evolution of that strain that goes through the vaccine. So it is a danger to the vaccinated, as well, if things get beyond threshold levels. And I’m not sure how much you can really keep your child in a bubble, but such conditions are made even less safe by avoiding the conditions all together, because the vulnerability becomes high in years when the introduction happens.
The morality question actually doesn’t work in terms of forced vaccination, because the harm to the majority is a slight contingent, at best, with a very tangible threat those with certain disorders. So it actually doesn’t quite work.
But, at that point, aren’t you playing Russian Roulette, to use your terms, with your child’s life? Chose this disease, let my child catch another? That seems to be dangerous, certainly, for what arguably is a contingency, and mere possibility argument (after all, we are at the point of arguing possible effects, not effects).
Also, you need to clarify the statement regarding the unvaccinated getting it from the vaccinated, because as it sits it doesn’t specify the vaccinated in regards to, because in one sense it can be correct and another isn’t likely.
Also, hold off on the “healthy people not autistic” thing, will you, for now? I’m healthy, autistic, and proud, and I have my reasons for saying so, but that’s another discussion.
And yes, autism is a whole lot better than many an individual dying from a childhood disease as made worse by another condition.
And, no, they aren’t directing because vaccines are more profitable, directly anyway; vaccines are known to directly help, where research does not.
Also, having read through that transcript, will you point out exactly what attitudes? As far as I could tell, the scientists did have a good grasp on the biotoxic effects. Would you demonstrate how you know more in this regard?
Cliff
Schwartz, HCN, Cliff, Matt, nym-d, I really mean it when I say that I appreciate your providing all this information and responding so carefully to others’ comments.
From the time of their discovery and first use, vaccines (from my reading on their history) have been viewed with suspicion and their use challenged. The notion of injecting some foreign substance into someone—-into a child, in particular—with the aim of making the person healthier, does seem counterlogical, but then much that sciences teaches us could be said to be, too (to make a very broad generalization). But I still think the recent attention given to a possible autism-vaccine link is excessive and that it has potentially distracted too many from what we needs to be focused on in regard to autism and services, education, and understand for autistic persons. I don’t think vaccines are the main issue for autism.
Whatever links between autism and vaccines might continue to be posited, and as we learn more about vaccine safety, I continue to think that this particular theory of autism causation is problematic in actually helping autistic persons. It puts too much emphasis on the issue of cause, when so much needs to be done for an autistic person today, and I don’t mean recovery. I mean basics of education and teaching.
That said, I really do appreciate this discussion; there is a reason why this issue has taken the attention and concern of so many and I’d rather be informed about every angle. For myself, I’ve known too many parents now who have gotten very “stuck” on trying to uncover some biomedical cause for why their autistic child does this or that, or is not doing this or that, and I am the kind of person who does best in helping with the here and now. And I’m very grateful that others can focus on other topics—-I’ve been accused of only “talking about autism,” as if it is a narrow topic, rather than one that extends to many, many things.
I would agree that they have been generally challenged; indeed, the point seems counter-intuitive. But I do think that, in general, science has reached a consensus to say that vaccines work and are helpful, and actually the logic when looked at an immunological perspective is not nearly so counter-intuitive.
And I certainly understand the emphasis on helping autistics really is best served in education, just like everyone else. Of course, in this case it doesn’t necessarily harm to talk about vaccination safety, since it is at least a tangential issue. But I certainly agree that identifying the cause isn’t as important as the education.
Cliff
I do not worry that my children will get the diseases that they have been vaccinated against. I worry about the children who can not recieve the vaccines because of medical reasons who will be at risk because more are choosing to not vaccinate. The cahances of having a reaction to vaccines is rare enless you have a family history and if you take autism out of it I do not recall much about reactions at all. I am aware of them because I have always had to sign a release for my children to recieve them and I do have a family history of severe reactions to the pertussus vaccine when it was still live since then there has not been a problem. I am not sure why they have to use religion in my state ny you can only opt out for religous reasons but I have gotten dr’s notes explaining why medically it was not advisable to give the vaccine at this time. I have found that as long as you are seeing a doctor and they know that you are making a sound medical decision it has not been a problem. I never had to use religion. I find that to be a easy way of saying I am afraid I do not know the facts I do not want to discuss but I will not vaccinate. I do not feel that is in the best interests of anyone.
I agree with Cliff. I actually do support the concept of vaccination and I believe it is useful and beneficial in specific cases, but that we must use the judiciously.
I can also sympathize with Kristina about the huge amount of emphasis on vaccines regarding Autism. I do not believe that vaccines cause all cases of Autism, and I’ll reserve judgement for now on some possible weaker correlations as more data comes in. Medical problems can be very convoluted and complicated, and I doubt all analysis has been done.
I think that as a society we need to support both people with Autism, and the families that support them because even if we find and eliminate a cause, they are a significant part of today’s society and will be for at least a couple generations.
I do think that the safety aspect of vaccines (and drugs in general) have been treated very casually for too long, and people are only starting to find this out as they investigate further. I think what we’re experiencing is a very strong backlash. People get very angry when something goes wrong, and when they try to find out what happened, they get defensive responses and stonewalling. Bullying parents doesn’t help.
So the pendulum is swinging wide. It believe it will eventually swing back to a more moderate position, and I believe that safety will be improved. Perhaps the medical community will be able to restore some of the confidence it lost from the public. But changes will have to occur first.
One last thing on the safety aspect (Julie’s point reminded me). I would love to know what the percentage of occurences of bad/hot batches of vaccines. I’ve read that a company in the UK got charged several years ago for spreading a hot batch around to different locations to avoid detection.
In Canada, we don’t even track reactions and I’ve read about exasperated parents here banging their head on the wall trying to extract the information from Health Canada (after their child had a serious reaction). That is another thing that needs fixing.
I’m the person who got pertussis and nearly died from it.
I know the kid I got it from. And the other 10 kids at the point of infection who got it. I was the only one to get really ill…and the only vaccinated one.
But theyre all immunocompetant NOW. In 20 years time, who knows?
Kristina, thank you for this valuable information. I’ve posted before regarding my child’s reaction to the Pertussis vaccine.
Autism arguments aside, there are medical reasons for not getting a specific vaccine.
Here is the link for contraindications according to the CDC:
http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/recs/vac-admin/contraindications-vacc.htm
I can’t remember where I first found the link for this chart, perhaps here on your site.
My point is that in my child’s case, for medical reasons, he should not receive the pertussis vaccine again. He should not have received it after the first one but our pediatrician did not think that our child’s reaction was anything to be alarmed about. By the CDC’s own standards, he was wrong but because we were a military family and he was a military doctor, he can’t be sued by us. My son went on to have two additional pertussis vaccines with an increasingly worse reaction to each one.
Eventually he was hospitalized with encephalitis after his final pertussis vaccine.
Even the CDC recognizes situations in which individuals should not be vaccinated and I’m not sure that all pediatricians are even aware.
If I had it to do over, my son would never have been vaccinated. I had mumps, measles and chicken pox as a child and every other kid I knew did too. I’ve never known anyone who had a horrible reaction to the actual diseases.
There are some vaccinations worth the risk – polio, etc.
I should have been more responsible and not have been intimidated into allowing him to be given shots that would send him to the ER.
Frankly, I’m so tired of this whole argument. Parents know their own children more than any doctor does and should be able to make decisions accordingly.
I’d home school my child before ever having him subjected to a vaccination containing mercury or a pertussis vaccine.
I don’t have any responsibility to other people’s children. Oh horror! When I think of all the nasty crap that goes around the schools that there are no vaccinations for.
They found lead in the drinking fountains at the schools in our county. That’ll be the day when the school system can tell me what shots to give my child, I don’t care if I have to join a cult, if it means that I spare my child encephalitis.
It’s my decision. After following bad advice from the experts, I now do what I think is best for my child.
And what about people minding their own business? That should be mandatory when you have a child, worry about your own kid, let everyone else worry about their own.
This whole topic just brings out the worst in me.
Cliff,
Your post is long, I’ll try to get through it all, but my kids may interrupt so it may be a couple of posts.
First, it is actually Mr. Schwartz, not Ms.
I’ll state where I think we agree first:
1) Vaccines can be beneficial and efficacious to the general population
2) They can help eradicate certain diseases
I know we disagree on the topic of vaccine safety, and I also don’t agree that taking one successful vaccine and applying it’s success to all vaccines is valid. Just like using one successful drug as an example and assuming that all drugs are effective and safe is not valid. The strategies of different vaccines vary and I do not agree with certain strategies (Prevnar, and HPV are examples) and I don’t believe that type of strategy has even come close to being proven to be safe or overall effective to date.
I also disagree that the efficacy of all of the vaccines has been statistically proven. The flu vaccine efficacy is still widely debated, as is the new HPV – we won’t know for years. I don’t think your examples of disease mutations appropriately explain the recent failures in MMR or Pertussis vaccine because they did not discover any new strains to my knowledge.
On the safety issue, we are solely relying on the “General Medical Community’s” word on the matter because the safety analysis in not adequate and the tracking is not adequate at all and the short term tracking is acknowledged by that same community to be insufficient for any meaningful analysis. You feel we’re dealing with facts, but if the analysis hasn’t been done, then we’re only dealing with educated guesses. In many of the cases, that is not good enough for me. IMO, there is also ample evidence of conflict of interst so the purported facts require extra scrutiny. The russian roulette scenario all depends on the risk rates you happen to belief (because there is a lack of facts). I can just as easily view getting a vaccine shot as playing Russian roulette.
We probably also disagree on which vaccines are really required for the whole population (mumps, rubella, Hepititus B) etc and I think that’s pretty much because we don’t agree on the statistics. We also need real statistics on manufacturing issues with vaccines. There is a real history of failure on that front as well. For how many years was the FDA warning Chiron to fix their problems until the Brits stepped in and put a stop to things? But who is going to fund a study into vaccine manufacturing processes — so it will forever remain unscientific. How many years did it take fully understand the impact of SV40 many decades ago? Again, I feel the attitude is skewed away from safety. There are transcripts from Australia where the doctors decided to continue shipping vaccine batches even knowing they were contaminated. This is similar to the attitude I observed in the CDC conference.
As for the morality issue, we’re arguing over statistics again. Yes, they have an elevated risk from most diseases. You can’t quantify the risk that they will die because my child isn’t vaccinated. And I still can’t get accurate numbers from specific vaccine risks. Again, the only numbers I have are for the most part taken from an industry funded safety study with a very short followup. So without those numbers we can’t weigh the balance of the risk and as I’ve explained the “general medical community” has not earned my trust. The morality question eventually boils down to a balance of risk, the actual risk to immunocompromised people being extremely difficult to calculate. We would also need accurate numbers of how many immunocompromised people there are.
“and thus the money was then spent in a futile manner while people die. That’s at least dangerous, and again it assumes that we must remove the quality in order for the right to be equally protected.”
Again, you ignore the real damage that vaccines cause to a small number of children (not Autism). These are not hypothetical scenarios, but a known and measured events. Yet you callously disgard them as a casualty of war on the assumption the minority’s medical problem can’t ever be solved. You can’t even determine the overall risk reduction to the immunocompromised from the reduction in disease X. That scenario does not appear any more moral than the one I’m proposing. (It also touches on one of the main philosophical flaws that I feel allopathy has fallen into, but that’s a much different discussion)
“Also, hold off on the “healthy people not autistic” thing, will you, for now? I’m healthy, autistic, and proud, and I have my reasons for saying so, but that’s another discussion.”
Noted. I apologize for the offensive statement.
“And yes, autism is a whole lot better than many an individual dying from a childhood disease as made worse by another condition.”
Interesting, but I don’t believe all Autistics are anywhere near the same in their symptoms or quality of life. My understanding is that many of them suffer from painful symptoms throughout their lives. But this argument goes straight back to the same balance of risks and numbers of people affected, which we don’t agree on.
“And, no, they aren’t directing because vaccines are more profitable, directly anyway; vaccines are known to directly help, where research does not.”
That statement is not at all true. Profits directly affect areas of research, that is a well known fact. There was a decline in vaccine research for many years for this actual reason. Recently, the research has surged mainly because of the profit potential from Gardasil and the proven profitability of Prevnar.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/26/business/yourmoney/26ping.html
As for the conference, I read it through around 5 years ago, and I’ll look it up again, but I have to finish some work tonight. From my memory though, I’m pretty sure the responsible scientists familiar with chemical toxicity were imported into the conference and were not usually involved in vaccination decisions.
I think this quote from the conference sums up part of the issue nicely:
“As an aside, we found a cultural difference between vaccinologist and environmental health people in that many of us in the vaccine arena have never thought about uncertainty factors before. We tend to be relatively concrete in our thinking.” Then he says, ” One of the big cultural events in that meeting —was when Dr. Clarkson repetitively pointed out to us that we just didn’t get it about uncertainty, and he was actually quite right.”
The other pervasive issue was the constant referal to lack of safety data:
“We held the aluminum meeting in conjunction with the metal ions in biology and medicine meeting, we were quick to point out that in the absence of data we didn’t know about additive or inhibitory activities.”
They also have no idea on the effects of ethylmercury despite having used it for decades and knowing that strongly related compounds were known to cause significant issues.
This one is a kicker:
” My mandate as I sit here in this group is to make sure at the end of the day that 100,000,000 are immunized with DTP, Hepatitis B and if possible Hib, this year, next year and for many years to come, and that will have to be with thimerosal containing vaccines unless a miracle occurs and an alternative is found quickly and is tried and found to be safe.”
This was after basically stating that they should never have done the research in the first place.
I do agree that forgoing vaccines in cases of a contraindication is a very wise thing to do.
However, I do note that it does follow something of a tragedy of the commons; too many people chose to benefit (assuming their is a benefit) by not vaccinating, it will create circumstances that can harm a whole lot of people.So it’s not really a fully independent decision, in my mind. The argument works a whole lot like the tragedy of the commons used in environmental sciences. That doesn’t go against contraindications, though; there can reasonably be exception for those who clearly need it per circumstance.
And I also challenge, in degree, parents knowing more about their children than anyone else on the planet in the realm of physiology. Honestly, parents don’t have that kind of access. They have been around their child such to have a reasonable intuition into their child’s motives and thoughts, but no such access to the child’s immunological system.
Cliff
Bah, more bad spelling in the post awaiting moderation.
Cliff
Cliff,
These interfaces are definitely challenging.
“I do agree that forgoing vaccines in cases of a contraindication is a very wise thing to do.”
Damage is done to children who don’t have any known contraindications and I challenge you to determine conclusively if a 2 month old is sick and when in doubt they vaccinate. I can speak from experience, that it is nearly impossible until children are quite a bit older to really understand what is going on (doctor or parent) and I pay close attention to these things.
This goes back to one of my main issues with the ages in the vaccine schedule.
I suspect that many immocompromised children are only discovered after reacting to vaccines since doctor’s don’t ever test for that kind of thing beforehand. And I also suspect specialized followup would only occur if the parents insisted, since reactions to vaccine are often just accepted without further analysis.
If the system worked in a way where children were actually analyzed and tested before vaccine application (assuming we had actually studied why certain people react, but no such analysis is actually done), there is a good chance I would be participating.
I can’t totally disagree with the tragedy of the commons point. I suppose if the safety aspects weren’t yet addressed, and I felt confident that the overall vaccination rate was dropping and I also felt confident that there was a real danger of increase in incidents that would harm a significant number of people, then I might change my mind with regard to specific vaccines. But that decision would require significantly different circumstances than we have today.
And yes, that is a sort of experiment on it’s own (as someone will undoubtedly point out), but it is not any riskier than the mass experimentation that is currently ongoing IMO.
As for parents knowing more than the doctors point. In many cases I’m sure you’re right, but on the other hand, the doctors never know that much anyways. For parents who pay attention, I guarantee they will be far better atuned to the health of their child, and they will also know how to effectively leverage their doctor to gain insight or analysis into areas that medicine excels in. For the majority of parents that don’t, the verdict is debatable, I agree.
However, I don’t believe we would ever as a society be able to remove responsibility for children’s health from the parents. Until that happens, it has to remain their choice as no doctor will take that responsibility and neither will the state. Kind of like removing the right of ignorant people to vote. We’re stuck with that reality in our democratic society.
Bah, I apologize on the name; that’s actually a typo, not a conception error.
Actually, I’m not sure that all vaccines aren’t harmful per se. In fact, if you would point to a specific vaccine, give me the numbers for it, and let me have a look, there might be a specific issue. However, the discussion has been, as far as I could tell, over perhaps many of the vaccines that might not be “necessary”.
What we more really do disagree on is what counts as adequate. You want a whole different level of access than what in my opinion is practical and possible, given constraints. Things can be demonstrated in clinical, short term studies, and we have a disagreement there too.
I’ll be a little honest with you. I do agree we are arguing over statistics, and I’ve given you a resource that might help in that regard, but some of the childhood diseases have been traditionally known to manipulate populations on a large scale. The elimination (note not eradication; that term only applies to smallpox) of many childhood disease were linked to populations being able to grow and sustain current size. That’s why, when comparing it to complications occurring with vaccines, I tend to fall with the vaccines being more safe.
In regard to the number of recording vaccine-caused deaths, that’s true, I do seem to dismiss that. I do think that the numbers are higher for asthmatics and others like them than for those complications. But I don’t really dismiss them; I would be all for people looking more for contraindications and how they occur.
Ah, autism, yes; I was low-functioning, of the self-damaging caliber, of what me considered the worst level. And it was frustrating. But was it death? Nooooooo… I don’t even think it would be fair. Not at all. I had a life, there were times to enjoy in it, it probably looked worse to my parents than to me. So I don’t think that’s true at all. I will hold, from personal experience from what is considered the worst, that autism is better than death.
I mentioned looking into contraindications, and I think there is evidence, of the genetic sort, which allows us to look ahead to that with some success.
I do think conditions are such that we do have a relative degree of safety issue that’s not far off. Many of the vaccination rates are in the high eighties/low nineties. That’s pretty damn close to the threshold levels (again, see the review).
I would say if you have a doctor who is clueless in that regard, get another. There are plenty of doctors that are good, and plenty that aren’t, and I do think it is important to make sure of that. Especially so if you care as much as you do about your child. If anything, it is good for the parent to raise concerns and see if the doctor knows of scientific data to back up his point. I don’t think that, if the doctor is much of a real doctor to be making these distinctions, the parent will really know more about the immunological system.
Here in the U.S, there is a tendency both ways on that, in different circumstances. “Emergency” can be used for a whole lot of things, like taking property away.
I do agree, except that the argument for “health” can go both ways. But if you have an issue of the tragedy of the commons at stake, then government control can occur. It’s not something out of reach, because we (in the U.S, don’t remember or know where you are) have things like State of Emergency and quarantine, where the government really can take control in face of a potential crisis.
Cliff
Oh, the Simpsonwood Conference. Those two statements were right at the beginning, no?
I do think that some of the uncertainty issue was addressed, but I think it wasn’t as much a sweeping effect as suggested, but limited to barrier-passing levels.
And not knowing the additive and inhibitory effects aren’t as drastic as suggested per se, because there’s still a lot that can be known. Neither addresses the general metabolic rate, which was demonstrated to be faster and with less damage than methyl mercury (but, again, let me find that study). So there are inferences that can be made from the numbers on methyl mercury, which would have a more drastic effect, as means of using the worst case scenario. Cast in that light, the lack of data can only get better, not worse.
But let me see if I can find that mandate quote again, from who, and in what context before I address it.
Cliff
Hi Schwartz –
Your unwavering logic and refusal to jump into rhetoric is very refreshing for this topic.
Though I can do very little to add to the remarks already left, one particular quote has bothered me quite a bit, from none other than the frequently quoted Paul Offit.
In regards to the Denmark study on MMR and measles, wherein a drastic change in diagnostic criteria occurred in mid study and were not corrected for, he says:
“It is difficult to conceive of a larger, better constructed, more definitive study than that
performed in Denmark.”
http://www.immunize.org/safety/boxa.pdf
Why on Earth should we trust this person to make good choices regarding the health of our children?
Take care!
- pd
Cliff,
The mandate quote comes from near the end. It is the representative from ACIP (?) who was just listening in on most of the discussion. (I’m at work, so I don’t have the minutes here)
The first quote is just one of many, where when asked about possible problems (and this conference was shortly after another conference discussing the toxicity of aluminum I believe) regarding metals used in vaccines, where they had no idea of the potential impact.
It am very concerned that no one had ever deemed to look into any of these toxicity issues, nor had they considered an issue. It is surprising, because these substances had been used for a long time, and evidence that they are toxic and harmful biologically has been accumulating for decades.
PD,
There was a double whammy in the Danish study. There was the one that you mentioned. Another was the change in population criteria. Population criteria were changed from in-patient hospital care, which is highly restrictive, to both in-patient and out-patient care. This change was mid study with no control or correction.
Thanks for the specifics. I’ll look at that.
Cliff
passionlessDrone,
I am familiar with that quote, and I guarantee you will find many other researchers who treated that same paper with a high level of credibility when it was first published. You find exactly the same pattern with the MMR studies in the UK. The irony in the UK is that most of those studies were deemed not credible within a couple of years by the Cochrane Group. In one case, a study author (of the lastest study) admitted that the previous studies were inadequate (the one he/she authored). So this is not unique to Dr. Offit. The sad part is that people continue to reference these studies, because they do not get marked or tagged as non-credible even if the author admits it. Even more amusing is when new studies continue to reference them.
Dr. Offit is definitely a repeat offender. You’ll notice the FUD examples I quoted earlier were mostly from Dr. Offit and there are more outrageous ones that aren’t even worth printing or discussing.
However, one person’s bad quotes don’t make a scientific argument nor do they prove the opposite of what their saying. All you can do for people like him, is ask for and track down the evidence provided and prove the inaccuracies.
If someone presents you with referenceable facts, you have to analyze them independent of the person delivering them. This is a trap that many people fall into on both sides of the debate. Many people refuse to look at studies not published by people with a PhD. Others assume that peer-review = credible. More people immediately disregard any study published by the CDC. None of these are a good critical approach. If presented with evidence, one must evaluate the evidence independent of those that present or generate it.
Reputation only comes into play as it can help you prioritize where you will apply your resources in critically examining presented facts, or when someone expresses an opinion.
That is why I am drawing a line in the sand with the General Medical Community on this topic, because I do not trust their opinion without supporting facts which are sometimes glossed over. My personal experience and research have eliminated any benefit of the doubt they once had on most topics (not all mind you). Thus, I am currently stuck with relying on raw data to make decisions.
Kristina,
Not to beat on old horse, but I just read this:
“In Virginia the issue of religious exemption was taken to the state Supreme Court by a Virginia Beach resident, Waleen James. She chose natural health care for her grandson and fought it in court. The court ruled that if it was a strong personal belief that vaccinations could do harm to the child then it could be considered a religious belief and a parent did not have to belong to an organized church that does not practice medical intervention to submit the “religious exemption.”"
http://www.dailypress.com/news/opinion/dp-ed_sunltrs_11110nov11,0,891228.story
It would seem that in Virginia at least, the courts have determined that strongly held beliefs against vaccine legitimately qualify as a “religious belief” and therefore they don’t need to be a member of an organized church to qualify.
That would certainly explain the actions of many parents, especially when they’re being instructed by the courts to do this.