I agree wholeheartedly with mckenzie’s sentiments. One of my first posts a number of years back was in response to someone just like APV. The thread went on for weeks and many pages during which I answered her concerns and claims one by one with citations and in the end got no where. people who are fearful of vaccines and who believe the tripe and psuedoscience on the internet concerning this issue are very difficult to educate. That said I wil make one comment that APV might hopefully find useful
APV I don’t have the time or the energy to address every point in your entire belief system concerning vaccines but there is a common thread among your arguments which may be worth addressing. It is also most likely a byproduct and a weakness of your training in engineering. Many of your arguments come down to complaints about the individual components of vaccines but this approach suffers from a serious shortcoming. You can not examine a vaccine component the way you would evaluate a gear for a car or even a lubricant.
Your approach assumes we understand everything about how the machine works and we do not. We know far more about how the body works than we did 100 years ago but what we know is dwarfed by what we don’t know. The body is not a simple machine. Every organism is essentially a complex interplay between the millions of chemical reactions within the organism. For that reason we can not look at how a substance affects a single chemical pathway or even a cell and then make accurate predictions about how it will affect the organism as a whole. Such predictions are not just occasionally wrong, they are wrong far more often than they are correct.
For this reason most medical trials these days are not done to see if a drug affects a change in a certain chemical pathway but instead we look to see how it affects an outcome. Instead of testing to see if a new drug lowers cholesterol what we really care about is whether it reduces heart attacks or even more importantly does it reduce overall deaths since a drug that just lowers cholesterol may do neither of these things.
The same approach would be the appropriate one for your needs. Its matters not if a particular substance is determined to be toxic under certain laboratory conditions ( and it matters even less if a government outlaws the use of a substance since these decisions are often politically motivated), what matters is whether that substance used in the way intended leads to worse outcomes of any sort in large numbers of human beings who use the product.
Vaccine opponents are fond of pointing out individual components of vaccines that may under certain circumstances in high doses cause problems for a cell in a petri dish or an animal in a lab but none of that matters if it doesn’t apply to the real world. When you look at the overall safety record of vaccines and the enormous success we have had using them it becomes quickly apparent that these concerns have no basis in reality.
Lausten wrote: “So you accept that vaccines do work and herd immunity is an important part of how they work?”
If you read my post completely, I not only accept that vaccines work, I also pointed out that that is also the proof that vaccines cause allergies. Conceptually vaccines work by causing allergies to viruses and bacteria.
If vaccines don’t work, they cannot cause allergies.
“… multiple studies are required to determine the safeness or dangers”
Here are multiple studies showing the dangers of injecting/introducing undesirable proteins into the body/bloodstream:
- Charles Richet discovered more than a hundred years ago that injecting proteins (such as those present in vaccines or injections) will cause the development of allergies to those proteins.
He was awarded the Nobel Prize for this work. - Kuno-Sakai H, Kimura M. Removal of gelatin from live vaccines and DTaP-an ultimate solution for vaccine-related gelatin allergy.Biologicals 2003;31:245-9. [PubMed]
3.Tick bites result in the injection of a protein called alpha-gal (which is present in red meat) into the blood stream. Result is people develop red meat allergy.
Allergenicity of Carbohydrates and Their Role in Anaphylactic Events - PMC
4.When acidity in the stomach is reduced by acid reducing medications, food proteins are not broken down. They travel to the intestine intact and get absorbed into the blood stream. Result is food allergy.
http://www.immuneweb.com/wenzhai/pdf/010301.pdf
5.Birmingham N., Thanesvorakul S., Gangur V. Relative immunogenicity of commonly allergenic food versus rarely allergenic and non-allergenic foods in mice. J. Food Prot. 2002;65:1988–1991.
Scientists regularly induce food allergies in mice by injecting food proteins along with adjuvants. Exactly the same as vaccinating humans with vaccines containing food proteins.
6.Mechanism by which a sustained inflation can worsen oxygenation in acute lung injury - PubMed
Scientists induce lung injury in animals using Polysorbate 80. Polysorbate 80 is present in many vaccines.
The FDA has admitted they have not done a single study to show that the amount of food proteins present in vaccines are safe.
So forget multiple studies determining safety. Could you please post one study?
6.Mechanism by which a sustained inflation can worsen oxygenation in acute lung injury - PubMed
Scientists induce lung injury in animals using Polysorbate 80. Polysorbate 80 is present in many vaccines.
Could you please post one study that has looked at vaccines with Polysorbate 80 and safety w.r.t to asthma in humans?
And FWIW, I got an intradermal flu vaccine last week.
A detailed rebuttal of the pseudoscientific, anti-vaccine nonsense in this thread would be just like a detailed rebuttal of all the arguments for the existence of God--good sport for some, a tedious exercise for others, and ultimately pointless since APV isn't going to be swayed by mere facts anyway. There are plenty of web sites that talk about the thimerosal myth], the myth that vaccines are a major cause of allergic disease], and other vaccine myths]. Having those same tired old futile arguments doesn't sound like fun. But with regards to the flu vaccine specifically, here's something that is fun! :-) A Budget of Dumb Assess]Apparently the link is only for physicians. I cannot access it. If all the peer-reviewed published references I provided are "pseudoscientific", then I suppose vaccines are approved based on the same pseudoscience?
macgyver,
I agree that we understand very little about the human body.
Can you tell me what is causing the food allergy epidemic?
I am pointing out that there is a clear pattern in multiple peer-reviewed published work starting from Charles Richet’s Nobel Prize winning discovery, that injecting food proteins into the body is the likely cause.
When you admit that medical science understands so little, how can you confidently dismiss the above as wrong without providing any evidence?
When medical science understands so little, I would expect an extremely cautious approach. Yet what I see is overconfidence. The FDA declares “Only if a vaccine’s benefits are found to outweigh its potential risks does the FDA grant a license for the vaccine, allowing it to be used by the public.” when in the fact the truth is more like the entire population is a laboratory. The FDA is just feeling its way through safety.
When you know so little, how can you confidently assert that five vaccines in one sitting is safe for a child?
When we understand so little it also means the safety record of vaccines is still a work in progress. Maybe vaccines are the cause of the food allergy epidemic. In which case the safety record is going to look different.
The safe dosage of acetaminophen depends on the amount of alcohol consumed. Likewise, the amount of thiomersal the body can handle may depend of what you eat for breakfast.
When we understand so little, how can we claim thiomersal is safe? Maybe it is causing sub-clinical kidney damage in our kids. Fifty years from now, they could have a kidney failure epidemic.
It is not as if I am raising an alarm about injecting sodium chloride. Thiomersal is well known to be very toxic.
In the end, no product is perfect. What is wrong in demanding a better product?
If people choose the vaccines with the least amount of undesirable excipients, the vaccine makers will get the message.
OK I’m done here. You are not capable of understanding anything we have tried to explain to you or you wouldn’t continue to repeat the same tired arguments. I find it hard to believe that you are an engineer because most engineers I know are pretty rational people.
I started to google Charles Rickert, then I noticed it was 100 years ago that he got his Nobel Prize. Yes, the first step to figuring out vaccines were simple, give someone the disease and they gain immunity. We’ve gotten much better at it now. That is the first sign of a pseudo-scientist, they grab stuff from a long time ago if it supports their argument and ignore anything we’ve discovered recently that doesn’t support them.
mckenzievmd,
Thank you for the links.
Everyone in my family is up to date on vaccines per the CDC schedule with the exception of HPV.
So when I say I am “pro-safe vaccine”, that is exactly what I am, not anti-vaccine.
The article shows that in some age groups allergy was higher in unvaccinated children and in other age groups allergies were higher in the vaccinated group. They did not look into food allergies.
The article shows unvaccinated group 1-10 years of age had exactly ZERO cases of asthma.
The authors dismiss that important finding with this statement:
“No doctors’ diagnoses of bronchial asthma were reported for unvaccinated children aged 1–10 years. Because of the low incidence of asthma and given the fact that diagnosing asthma in this age group is difficult, no cases of asthma were to be expected within the small group of unvaccinated children. "
Their conclusion makes no mention of this finding.
Diagnosing asthma in that age group is difficult? The Mayo Clinic does not think so.
I know several kids including mine that were diagnosed with asthma under 10.
Is that not cherry picking?
There are 50 myths but no reference to polysorbate 80 or food allergies in the article.
Repeats “the dose makes the poison” and I agree.
Let’s look at the doses and do the math:
A typical flu shot contains 15 mcg of hemagglutinin (HA) protein per virus type and on average ~0.5 mcg of ovalbumin protein. About 60% of US children who receive a flu shot get sensitized to the HA protein. The result is the immune system attacks HA proteins on subsequent exposure giving protection against the flu virus. One can expect 60/(15/0.5)=2% of those who receive the flu shot to get sensitized to the ovalbumin protein. The result is the immune system attacks the ovalbumin protein on subsequent exposure, giving egg allergy. Indeed the estimated prevalence of egg allergy in children in the US is ~2% of the population. Mere coincidence?
http://www.fda.gov/downloads/BiologicsBloodVaccines/Vaccines/ApprovedProducts/UCM371815.pdf
http://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/season/effectivenessqa-2013-14.htm
http://www.foodallergy.org/document.doc?id=194
If you break a compact flourescent lamp (CFL), you are advised to evacuate the room and ventilate to avoid breathing the mercury vapors.
http://www2.epa.gov/cfl/cleaning-broken-cfl
Even if thiomersal has nothing to do with autism, there’s no good reason to save money by injecting mercury containing thiomersal.
OK I'm done here. You are not capable of understanding anything we have tried to explain to you or you wouldn't continue to repeat the same tired arguments. I find it hard to believe that you are an engineer because most engineers I know are pretty rational people.Please be specific about what you find irrational.
I started to google Charles Rickert, then I noticed it was 100 years ago that he got his Nobel Prize. Yes, the first step to figuring out vaccines were simple, give someone the disease and they gain immunity. We've gotten much better at it now. That is the first sign of a pseudo-scientist, they grab stuff from a long time ago if it supports their argument and ignore anything we've discovered recently that doesn't support them.Charles Richet found that if you inject a protein into a mammal, the mammal develops an allergy to that protein. Please tell me what new development in medicine conflicts with that finding, by including peer-reviewed published references. The fact is you are wrong because scientists do exactly what Richet did to induce food allergy in mice to this day. Birmingham N., Thanesvorakul S., Gangur V. Relative immunogenicity of commonly allergenic food versus rarely allergenic and non-allergenic foods in mice. J. Food Prot. 2002;65:1988–1991. So please give it some more thought before you label somebody a pseudo-scientist.
I started to google Charles Rickert, then I noticed it was 100 years ago that he got his Nobel Prize. Yes, the first step to figuring out vaccines were simple, give someone the disease and they gain immunity. We've gotten much better at it now. That is the first sign of a pseudo-scientist, they grab stuff from a long time ago if it supports their argument and ignore anything we've discovered recently that doesn't support them.Charles Richet found that if you inject a protein into a mammal, the mammal develops an allergy to that protein. Please tell me what new development in medicine conflicts with that finding, by including peer-reviewed published references. The fact is you are wrong because scientists do exactly what Richet did to induce food allergy in mice to this day. Birmingham N., Thanesvorakul S., Gangur V. Relative immunogenicity of commonly allergenic food versus rarely allergenic and non-allergenic foods in mice. J. Food Prot. 2002;65:1988–1991. So please give it some more thought before you label somebody a pseudo-scientist. I'm wrong about what? You said:
Over a hundred years ago, Charles Richet discovered that injecting proteins into mammals will cause them to develop an allergy. He won the Nobel Prize for his finding. The FDA has not done a single study to find out how much of the undesirable proteins can be safely injected into humans. Where is the science, the data demonstrating the benefit outweighing the risk? The FDA and Dr. Offit are speculating that vaccines do not cause allergies. They don’t have the data. Please prove me wrong by pointing to the studies.You go from talking about 100 year old science to talking about unsafe injections without taking a breath. Why should I bother linking anything when you've already decided they don't have the data. I'm not an immunologist, why would you challenge me on a topic like this? Why would come to this forum and make these challenges? If there were actual challenges that could and should be made, someone who is trained in this field would be doing it. Why don't you go find them and leave us alone?
Lausten,
You wrote: “I started to google Charles Rickert, then I noticed it was 100 years ago that he got his Nobel Prize. Yes, the first step to figuring out vaccines were simple, give someone the disease and they gain immunity. We’ve gotten much better at it now. That is the first sign of a pseudo-scientist, they grab stuff from a long time ago if it supports their argument and ignore anything we’ve discovered recently that doesn’t support them.”
Your response implies that Richet’s work is no longer relevant due to new discoveries. I wrote, you are wrong about that.
My point is that injecting undesirable proteins, has been known for over a 100 years to cause the development of life-threatening allergies.
The FDA is still ignoring this knowledge and approving vaccines that contain undesirable proteins. The result is an epidemic of life-threatening food allergies in our kids.
If this is not your area of expertise, please feel free to ignore my posts.
If this is not your area of expertise, please feel free to ignore my posts.If it's not in your area expertise, please feel free to not post at all. The idea of a forum is to discuss issues, not write polemics.
Sorry about the Medscape link. The site is free, but one does have to register. Here’s a version of the humorous article with no access requirements:
A Budget of Dumb Asses]
We humans, each and every one of us, are either fools or damn fools but if you have nough sense to be vaccinated you will not be deligated to the damn category.
If this is not your area of expertise, please feel free to ignore my posts.If it's not in your area expertise, please feel free to not post at all. The idea of a forum is to discuss issues, not write polemics. You also wrote "I asked why you thought the FDA would ignore you. You didn't answer that.". It showed up in my Inbox but not in your post?! As I wrote, I researched the flu vaccines to find the safest ones for my family. I shared it in the hope that it will be useful. I am sorry that it was of no use to you. For me, vaccine safety is an issue that needs to be discussed. If people chose safer vaccines and rejected unsafe ones, the vaccine makers will take notice. Basically, vote with your wallet. Regarding the FDA, I can't read their minds. The CIA had its Iraqi WMD fiasco. The NSA had Edward Snowden. The Secret Service can't protect the President. CDC can't contain deadly germs within its labs. The FDA approved Vioxx which was voluntarily withdrawn by Merck because it killed too many people. Former CDC director Julie Gerberding now heads Merck's vaccine division. http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/protect-yourself/ points out that you cannot trust health care workers. One can only wish that the FDA was a Flawless Drug Administration. If they did their jobs, we would not have this debate. Have a safe(r) vaccine!
Sorry about the Medscape link. The site is free, but one does have to register. Here's a version of the humorous article with no access requirements: A Budget of Dumb Asses]I registered as a consumer. It seemed like you get access only when you register as a physician? Thanks for the new link.
You also wrote "I asked why you thought the FDA would ignore you. You didn't answer that.". It showed up in my Inbox but not in your post?! As I wrote, I researched the flu vaccines to find the safest ones for my family. I shared it in the hope that it will be useful. I am sorry that it was of no use to you. For me, vaccine safety is an issue that needs to be discussed. If people chose safer vaccines and rejected unsafe ones, the vaccine makers will take notice. Basically, vote with your wallet.I erased it because I looked back and saw you had answered that already. Not satisfactorily, but I see no point in going over it again. Guilt by association is not an answer. Your logic above is that "some gov't orgs lie sometimes, so this one is lying now." You show signs of intelligence, you can't possibly accept that logic. If you want to "research" vaccine safety, go ahead, but quit trying to frighten others because your ability to research is flawed. Your criteria for what is "safer" is no better than Glenn Beck's criteria for what is "American".
You also wrote "I asked why you thought the FDA would ignore you. You didn't answer that.". It showed up in my Inbox but not in your post?! As I wrote, I researched the flu vaccines to find the safest ones for my family. I shared it in the hope that it will be useful. I am sorry that it was of no use to you. For me, vaccine safety is an issue that needs to be discussed. If people chose safer vaccines and rejected unsafe ones, the vaccine makers will take notice. Basically, vote with your wallet.I erased it because I looked back and saw you had answered that already. Not satisfactorily, but I see no point in going over it again. Guilt by association is not an answer. Your logic above is that "some gov't orgs lie sometimes, so this one is lying now." You show signs of intelligence, you can't possibly accept that logic. If you want to "research" vaccine safety, go ahead, but quit trying to frighten others because your ability to research is flawed. Your criteria for what is "safer" is no better than Glenn Beck's criteria for what is "American". No, some gov't orgs lie sometimes, so be skeptical about his one too. mckenzievmd and Scott_Pryor provided peer-reviewed published references. I pointed out the limitations of those articles. Since you claim my research is flawed, you should provide references showing why or point out the flaws in my references. But then you complain I am challenging a non-immunologist ... If you are not frightened by what's in the vaccine, you should be!
As a health care professional, I get the flu vaccine every year, and encourage my family to do the same. I consider it mandatory for my grandchildren. I have spent far too many years with the ICU I worked in full of patients dying or seriously ill from the flu, and occasionally having other effects of the virus, such as a need for a heart transplant. In my hospital, vaccination is mandatory, as I believe it should be. We have, in the past, had instances of health care professionals giving a flu to a patient in the hospital with something else, and who could ill afford a viral infection. A young co-worker with no underlying health problems died 3 years ago from the flu. The flu vaccination is one of the most well researched vaccines out there. It is generally effective and saves lives. You should be more concerned that 30-35,000 people die of the flu every year, and more in years with epidemic flu.
I refuse to try to reason with an anti-vaxxer who has little or not understanding of human biology or immunology. Suffice it to say, no doctor I work with refuses the vaccination for him or herself or their family. Same with all of the other health care professionals. We had an extremely high vaccination rate, even before it became mandatory. I have been vaccinating for over 20 years. We care about ourselves as much as any other person cares about their family and want the best for them…which is why all of my children and grandchildren are, and will always be, fully vaccinated. I have multiple allergies, some serious, as do my children and one of my grandchildren. It is not a barrier to vaccination.